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  • Writer's pictureKelly M. Hudson

Rabid and Sticky



Rose (Laura Vandervoort) works for a fashion agency. She’s a quiet, keep-to-herself kind of gal who has ambitions to be a designer but is held in check by her shy personality. She has a terrible traffic accident that leaves her horribly disfigured. Enrolling in an experimental stem-cell treatment, she heals completely, coming out of the incident stronger and prettier than ever. She overcomes her shyness and learns to excel as a designer. But there is another problem, a deadly one, and its causing her to have lucid, vivid nightmares of eating flesh and infecting other people with a virulent strain of rabies. But are they dreams? Is Rose responsible for the pandemic that is sweeping her town?

Of course she is.


Rabid (2019) is a remake of an old Cronenberg film of the same name from 1977. That film starred Marilyn Chambers and while the stories are very similar, as are the major themes, they do diverge in details. The Rose in the original is never someone we’re given a chance to care for or identify with before her accident. It’s only after, as she’s struggling to understand what’s happening to her, that we begin to have sympathy for her. Oddly, my experience was that I felt more for the original Rose character in the first movie than for the new, updated version, despite having much more time devoted to getting to know this new Rose before things fall apart. Not that Vandervoort isn’t good in the main role; she most certainly is. She conveys the anguish and pathos of her ongoing transformation with great skill. Rose goes through it, and the road she travels is agonizing. In the original, she felt more like a victim, whereas in this remake, she is undergoing more of a transformation, changing into something more than human, perhaps.

Jen and Sylvia Soska directed this remake and they do an excellent job. There’s plenty of homages to Cronenberg’s work (I see you, creepy red surgical gowns from Dead Ringers!) and they keep the body-horror theme alive in this version, as well. Rose’s body is changing, altering into something new, and we’re all along for the ride. This version is much gooier, with plenty of sticky blood. Rose’s facial mutilation is painful to see. Every makeup design and effect is updated, using current standards, and while this does create a level of visceral uncomfortableness that the original doesn’t have, it oddly doesn’t touch the original when it comes to high weirdness and its general tone of despair and strangeness. This version is also much longer, which is to its detriment. It drags just a bit here or there. And one other point, vital to the original but missing in this one: the boyfriend (Hart, played with great sympathy by Frank Moore, a sort of Christopher Walken clone). We see a good bit of what is developing through the eyes of Rose’s boyfriend in the original, as society falls apart as the plague spreads, but we also get that heartrending moment at the end, when Hart is begging Rose not to stay in the same apartment as a man possibly infected by this new strain of Rabies. My god, the pathos in that scene will crush your soul. There’s nothing like that here, no Hart character, no one to reflect and contrast who Rose was and who she is becoming. And that lessens the emotional impact, at least to me.


Was there a need to remake the original? Nope. There almost never is. Do the Soska sisters do a good job? Yes, yes they do. They add their own unique voices to an original masterwork and make this version most definitely their own. I try to think of remakes like I do song covers. Some copy the original in most every detail (Gus Van Sant’s Psycho), others take the original and add their own personality to it (Marcus Nispel’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and the rarer few completely transform it into something almost unrecognizable (John Carpenter’s The Thing). This version falls in the middle category. We get the original and we get some updating and polishing, along with some personal flourishes (such as the Soska sense of humor that pervades much of the proceedings). Whether their update is effective depends on where you stand with remakes in general, if you’ve ever even seen the original, and how much of the changes you can stomach. For me, it was a pretty decent remake, much like The Crazies. I won’t pour over it obsessively like the original, but I may see it again, if the mood strikes.

Two and a Half Stars out of Four


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