It's always exciting when it's time to check
out another David Cronenberg movie, and this time is no different as Horrorfest
bestows 1979's THE BROOD upon me. It's a hell of a title for a movie and a name
I've seen pop up many times over the years, so I’m glad I finally saw it. I'd
say it ranks about in the middle of Cronenberg's filmography – not among the
best, but better than some.
The great Oliver Reed stars as a
psychotherapist/cult-leader who runs a retreat where he's keeping his favorite
patient (Samantha Eggar) separated from society. After mysterious wounds appear
on this patient's child's (Cindy Hinds) body, the child's father (Art Hindle)
shows up to announce there will be no more visitations.
Hindle sets off on a quest to expose Reed as a
quack and shut the whole place down, but before he can even get started, his
mother in law is attacked by a strange dwarf apparently living in her
cupboards. You read that right. The movie is just trucking along, the mother in
law is babysitting the kid, and suddenly a little troll (or something) busts
out of a kitchen cabinet and murders the shit out of her.
The kid sleeps through everything, so for a
while, we in the audience are the only ones who know what's up. The little
trolls or dwarfs or deformed kids, or whatever they are, show up a few more
times, to kidnap the kid, murder her teacher, torment Hindle. That kind
of stuff.
You're probably wondering what I was
wondering: what do these little goblins have to do with Oliver Reed and the
woman at the psychotherapy retreat? Well, I'm not going to spoil it for you,
but the incongruity of the plot and complete insanity of these little killers
is a lot of what makes this movie worth watching.
Cronenberg has an interesting thing where no
matter what his subject matter his, his films are meticulously put together to
be entirely classy affairs. Sometimes this might come off as a clinical
detachment from the subject matter, but other times it's a sign that
Cronenberg's going all out, as if to say, no matter how crazy this stuff is,
it's a REAL FILM, goddammit.
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