Macabre...ish Horror Review: Rabid

Rabid, 1977/ 91 min.

A couple, Hart and Rose, get in a bad motorcycle accident when they crash into a van, parked in the road. Rose is in bad shape and is taken to a nearby Clinic specializing in plastic surgery. She receives grafts with a radical, new procedure performed by Dr. Keloid. It’s meant to replace skin and organs.

After a month, Hart is released but Rose is still comatose. When she does wake up, it’s violently and she injures a man to the point that he can’t remember what caused the injury, his blood isn’t clotting and he can no longer feel his right side. Meanwhile, Rose has mutated and only subsists on human blood. The mutation appears to be a fissure in her arm pit that looks like an anus and what looks like a proboscis comes out of it and it stabs into people (and animals) and syphons their blood. You got that? Her arm pit grew a butthole and a vampire straw comes out of it.

She sneaks out of the hospital to feed on cattle and a lecherous farmer and he turns into some kind of a zombie and starts attacking people. Whatever’s wrong with Rose, she’s passed it around. The News is calling it Rabies and Montreal is becoming overrun with infected.

Even the doctor who saved her life gets it. During a facelift surgery, he cuts off his nurses finger and starts trying to suck the wound. Sending the clinic into chaos.

Hart is sure, Rose is the cause. Especially as she hitchhiked and infected her way across Canada. But she’s in denial and makes an ill fated attempt to prove it and ends up discarded in an alley and tossed in trash truck, for her trouble.

This is a Canadian, David Cronenberg film. There is some nudity, blood and graphic violence.