The residents of a suburban high-rise apartment building are being infected by a strain of parasites that turn them into mindless, sex-crazed fiends out to infect others by the slightest sexual contact.
David Cronenberg’s career has been filled with a lot of ups and downs. Some of his films are hailed as classics (“Scanners,” “Videodrome,” “The Dead Zone,” “The Fly”) while others have been called less than stellar (“Naked Lunch,” “M. Butterfly,” “Crash”) but there is no denying Cronenberg’s diverse body of work. “Shivers” is listed as Cronenberg’s feature film directorial debut and unfortunately, it shows. The direction, camerawork, and acting are all amateurish at best with some of the movie’s ostensible “frightening scenes” generating unintentional laughter instead of genuine scares. It really is one of those titles that’s so bad it’s funny and while it’s easy to look at a film that was made in 1975 and critique it today, it was obviously a product of its time and sadly, hasn’t aged well. Other low-budget films like “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “Race with the Devil,” which came out around the same time as “Shivers,” have held up better over the years and prove with a good script, you’ve won half the battle. The screenplay for “Shivers” is tedious and banal, jumping on the zombie craze that was sweeping the world and Hollywood at that time, with little success.
On a privately-owned island just outside of Montreal, Canada, the Starliner Towers, a luxury apartment complex, stands tall. As the film opens, Dr. Emil Hobbes (Fred Doederlein) murders a 19-year-old schoolgirl named Annabelle (Cathy Graham). He then performs an impromptu autopsy on her stomach and when he sees what’s inside of her, he takes the scalpel to his own throat and kills himself. As the day progresses, more and more people succumb to strange behavior when the Starliner Towers’s resident doctor, Roger St. Luc (Paul Hampton), receives a phone call from his old friend Rollo Linsky (Joe Silver), who just happened to be the medical partner of the newly-deceased Emil Hobbes. Linsky proceeds to tell him that Hobbes was working on a new experiment, one where a synthetic parasite would absorb a failing human organ and eventually replace it. Apparently, that was the cover story he used to get funding for the project but in reality, he created the parasite utilizing a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease as he felt that modern-day humans had become estranged from their primal impulses and wanted to give them back their most basic primal instinct: sex. The final result is a parasite that causes the occupant to become sexually aggressive which can be passed on to other humans through kissing or sexual activity. As more and more tenants at the Towers become sexually belligerent, Roger must try to stop the spread of the parasite, before it’s too late.
“Shivers” is not scary in the least, there is absolutely nothing frightening about it whatsoever. The parasite, when you occasionally get to see it, is so inadvertently unscary, it makes you wonder how it caused controversy upon its initial theatrical release in Canada in 1975. The acting is painfully amateur and characters do and say things that are so bizarre and illogical, it makes you wonder if Dr. Hobbes’ assertion that mankind had become estranged from their primal impulses was incorrect, rather, they became estranged from legitimate common sense. In one scene, Roger’s assistant, Nurse Forsythe (Lynn Lowry), is preparing dinner for the two of them when a stranger forces his way into her apartment and tries to rape her. She manages to stab him with a pot fork and then races down to the basement where Roger is located. He tells her to stay put while he investigates her apartment and while he is rummaging around, she accidentally knocks over a glass and then proceeds to tell him, while giggling, she came back up because she didn’t want to burn his dinner. Huh? While I typically enjoy end-of-the-world movies, the fact that this one explains that anyone who becomes infected will turn into a sex-raged, sexually aggressive human with the intent of turning the world into one mindless orgy, didn’t make me feel sorry for humanity, instead, I thought of the number of people who would be lining up to be contaminated.
“Shivers” is worth a look only if you desire to see how Cronenberg’s very first feature turned out. Ivan Reitman (“Meatballs,” “Stripes,” “Ghostbusters”) served as the film’s producer and also on Cronenberg’s second movie, “Rabid,” which was well-received and far superior to this title. Thankfully, with each film under his belt, Cronenberg progressed as a filmmaker and has given the world some of its greatest horror flicks as well as some excellent thrillers later in his career. “Shivers” is not one of them.
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