David Cronenberg
1975
87 minutes
This is baseline early Cronenberg. Body horror contagious sexually transmitted disease nonsense that turns people into sex zombies. You know exactly what you're getting into when you start watching this. It's going to be full of spraying bodily fluids, people vomiting sex slugs with their eyes rolled back into their heads, un-sexy sex scenes, ugly people fucking and fighting, Canadians, all the reasons you tune in.
You've never been to an orgy. Not a zombie orgy, not a regular orgy. You accidentally went to a strip club in Montreal that ended up having sexy stage shows with naked men dancing with naked women, which really wasn't your thing. Nothing too extreme, more along the lines of Cirque du Soleil than dongs going in, though you weren't sitting close enough to confirm any penetration or lack thereof. No blue men at least. It wasn't as repulsive as this film, but it wasn't something you wanted to hang around to see more of either. You've not intentionally sought out live entertainment of this sort and you've tried to avoid being around other people getting their groove on. But you live in Baltimore, so of course you've seen some shit. And of course when you drove a cab you had numerous people do terrible gross things in your back seat, but the less said about that the better.
This film demonstrates all the more reason to avoid such nonsense. You get the sense that zombie sex orgies aren't for spectators. They demand participation. The zombie sex orgy participants in this film are eager to aggressively recruit in a way that right-wingers always fear extends to other people with alternative lifestyles, and this recruitment is extremely effective here for epidemiological reasons.
You remember the whole mythos and hysteria from the 1990s about "bug-chasers", people who would allegedly deliberately seek out HIV infection just to "get it over with already" since they couldn't stand the dread anymore. This, as with many myths of heteronormative reactionaries, turned out to be grossly overblown. But from the behaviors of right-wingers and anti-vaxxers during the pandemic, it seems depressingly likely that if there was an actual zombie sex orgy outbreak, right-wing incels would be lining up like crazy to be infected for various insane doctrinal reasons. This thought depresses you a bit and makes you ready to watch a different film.
Time to choose something different: