3 gibbles out of 5
Director: David Cronenberg
The picture at the bottom of this review is a spoiler. Close your eyes once you get down there.
Cronenberg’s a funny cat. When I was a young filmster, Croney was on my list of people to be into by default. I didn’t get around to watching ‘The Brood’ then, but I did the rounds with some of his other classics from that era. And yeah yeah, good stuff, real meaningful and all that, creepy, etc.
He dropped off my radar in favor of growing up (i.e. watching a ton of porn… which… maybe wasn’t so far from the Cronenberg field…) until ‘Spider’ came out years later. And ‘History of Violence,’ ‘Eastern Promises.’ Who was this Cronenberg? So I’ve slowly been going back over his history again. Now I’m not here to study the lineage of the films, though certainly there are themes shared across the board (yes, I’m only saying that to sound smart. I have no idea what mutant babies have to do with Russian mobsters.), but it’s been funny seeing how black and white the young Cronenberg’s films are. His concepts are expressed very oddly, but once you get to the point where someone turns into a fly, or explodes a head, the veil is dropped and you get what he’s going for.
‘The Brood’ is a convoluted and – typical of Croney – slowly unfolding story about… hm. Actually, telling you would ruin it if you haven’t seen it. There’s an experimental psychologist (Oliver Reed, typically regal, but well cast in the movie) who’s counseling the wife of Art Hindle. Art, meanwhile, is taking care of their daughter, but doesn’t believe in the psychologist’s methods, using “psychoplasmics,” negative energies in the body which, when realized, can cause physical change. ‘Physical change?’ Of course. It’s early Cronenberg, so body horror still rules the day. When little mutant creatures start popping up around the town and killin’ folk, Art Hindle suspects Oliver Reed and has to figure out the cause and how to stop it…
I watched ‘The Brood’ once and was bored out of my kit. Scanners, Videodrome – all of these are slow movies, with almost silly dialogue exchanges (in this case the therapy sessions) that are played dead straight and are, I assume, intended to be straight. But a lot of these films at least carry that creepy feeling that moves you from one slightly surreal scene to the next, to the inevitable mutating conclusion. ‘The Brood’ stays pretty mundane for a while, on all accounts. Even when we start to get pieces about what’s going on, it’s almost presented in-between the scenes, giving the feeling that we’re witnessing things after they’re occurring, which is a tension killer. Some of this might have to do with Art Hindle’s acting. It wasn’t bad, exactly. He’s nicely stoic. It’s just… odd. He doesn’t seem to respond to things with any kind of facial expression.
But then I watched ‘Brood’ again, with expectations in place of the story and the pacing. And then it was pretty awesome. A bit less powerful than some of his other movies, but that might be because the topic was more personal to Cronenberg. Is it a failure if you have to watch a film more than once to get it? I don’t know. Would I have given it another chance if the director hadn’t proven himself to me with other films? I don’t know. Why the hell are you asking these questions? I GAVE YOU YOUR RATING WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME
It's essentially a family film.
vaguely-offensive 