The Cronenberg Crawl: Being Stuck in Traffic With Naked Robert Pattinson Is No Fun Edition

Cosmopolis is a movie about how much it sucks to be bored, passionless, and cold, even when you’re on top of the world. That’s cool and everything, but I don’t go to the movies to not give a damn.

Robert Pattinson, not giving a damn.

Robert Pattinson is well-known for playing bloodless pillars built of strong chins and ennui. He’s mostly dead in Twilight but here he’s all dead here, so, as Billy Crystal would say, the only thing useful to be done with him at this point is to go through his pockets for loose change, not cast him in another movie. But here he is in Cosmopolis, in his limo, where he’s made a lot of money in the... money business (these movies always feature twenty-something billionaires with no discernible skills, which has me wondering why I’m writing this review in a studio apartment with no air conditioning and not from an office made of cocaine bricks). At the beginning of the movie, he declares that he needs a haircut, from a barber shop on the other side of Manhattan. Then, very slowly, in terrible traffic, he makes his way through Manhattan, interacting with a variety of odd characters, hearing in alarming little bursts that someone is trying to kill him and he is slowly losing his fortune. It’s a bad day in the money business, apparently. They talk about yen a lot in this movie but I didn’t really listen because damn, I hate math.

Robert Pattinson, still not giving a damn. 

Anyway, most of the movie takes place in Robert Pattinson’s limo, because the president is in town, a rapper has just died and the traffic is awful. Or, as this pretentious asshole of a movie puts it, “We need a haircut.” That’s Pattinson’s line. He speaks in the royal plural in this movie. Why? Because Don Delillo says so, that’s why. “You will hit traffic that speaks in quarter inches,” says Pattinson’s driver. Hang on a second -- traffic doesn’t speak. Is “speak” the word that Pattinson, Dellilo, and Cronenberg are looking for? Apparently it is, because the lines only spiral down frantically from there. I was a creative writing major in college (see preceding line about studio apartment and no air conditioning) and I heard some terrible dialogue spewed in undergrad workshops. This movie talks like the kid who wrote the worst dialogue in your fiction workshop, but only after you bought him too many drinks on the night that the other partners in his polyamorous group relationship voted him out, and several hours into his depression bender you got stuck listening him philosophize at the most overpriced bar in town bar while he tried to smoke an unlit cigarette. This movie talks like that guy. The dialogue goes nowhere, chases its tail, makes weird allusions, picks up threads, traces abstract thoughts, and abandons them quickly.

We get, for example, to see characters talk about holes. Here is the scene.

Character A: "Holes are interesting. There are books about holes."

Character B: "There are books about shit."

Is there a context in which this dialogue might be snappy and interesting? I doubt it. It definitely isn’t in this movie. And there are lines that sound smart at first listen but really aren’t, like when a character contemptuously refers to “Judeo-Christian jogging.” Judeo-Christian jogging, as opposed to -- what, secular-humanist jogging? There are lines that clip along at a brisk, breezy pace until one character utters such a dud that you have the sudden queasy sensation that the entire script stepped in a pile of dog turds.

Pattinson: “How old are you? I’m interested.”

Other guy: “How old? Forty-one.”

Pattinson: “Hm. A prime number.”

Other guy: “But not an interesting one.”

Did you hear the squish? It was a cool moment, when we see that Pattinson is so caught up in numbers that the first thing he notices about this man’s age is the fact that forty-one has no divisors. And then it’s... not an interesting prime number. Why not? What does Cronenberg have against forty-one? Is there something about forty-three I should know?

But worst of all are the characters who talk like no one you have ever met nor like anyone who has ever lived. There are dozens of examples. Pattinson’s wife calmly informs him that he “reek(s) of sexual discharge.” We learn that the “logical extension of business is murder,” which is a logic that I am not familiar with, but this is not my movie. A doctor tells us that Pattinson’s prostate is asymmetrical, which is a fact that both has massive symbolic significance and is something that every character in the movie knows and brings up repeatedly. Most obnoxious of all is a female character who monologues in what sounds like the comments on a philosophy blog if you back-translated them on Babelfish. “People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units. A box, a screen, a keyboard, are melting into the texture of everyday life. Is this not true?”

The dialogue sounds like jamming knitting needles in your ears, the characters are as bloodless as slugs, people you don’t care about keep getting shot in the head, and there is an extended motif of dead rats that is apparently important but I only remembered when I rewatched the trailer. There is nothing to get worked up about in this movie. 

Not even Robert Pattinson's prostate exam.

Robert Friggin' Pattinson Didn't Care Enough to Act in Cosmpolis So Beth Didn't Care Enough To Write A Review Either

So she wrote a recipe to accompany your viewing experience instead.

Not that we actually recommend this movie.

Beth's Cosmopolis Seafood Frittata

Three medium-sized fresh swordfish steaks, fresh (available at specialty markets)

10-20 uncooked medium-sized shrimp (ideally wildcaught)

3/4 cup white truffle mushrooms

3/4 cup high quality port

2 tbsp sevruga caviar

2 tbsp Iranian saffron

3 iPhone 5s, finely chopped

1/2 cup Mercedes 196 car battery, pureed

25 used condoms, patted dry

10-15 grams cocaine (The purer the better, in my experience. I tried it once with crack and it just didn't turn out.)

3 eggs, scrambled

Lightly grease a 9x9 baking pan and layer ingredients. Top with egg mixture. Look. Look at your excess.

"Meh."

The Cronenberg Crawl: Come for the Accents, Stay For The Bondage Edition

I hate this movie.

I generally applaud David Cronenberg’s devout love of brevity. I really do. But in order to adapt Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure into something more suitable for a jittery, distractible film audience, he’s trimmed the already-brisk original screenplay down to a starved, skeletal, ninety-seven-minute corset-ripper. So get this movie a sandwich, because this poor thing looks hungry, and get out of this movie's way, because it's in a big damn hurry.

Apparently the many minutes left out of this movie included any reason we might have for caring about the characters bickering on screen, other than the fact that the characters are important thinkers and they are bickering about important things. This is a problem because, even if what Jung, Freud, and Kiera Knightly say and do is significant according to modern historians, it doesn’t mean that what they say and do is interesting to this movie’s audience. A Dangerous Method wants to be an account of the complicated relationship between two brilliant psychiatrists and the woman who has the potential to rise to their level. Unfortunately, because the movie clips by so damn fast we get the feeling that most of the drama is taking place while we’re busy watching another character hurtle through his own arc. Thus, A Dangerous Method is not about disillusionment in academia, the strain of having a famous mentor, the birth of psychoanalysis, and sex, lies, and anti-Semitism in Victorian Europe. It’s about Michael Fassbender pretending to be Jung, Viggo Mortenson pretending to be Freud, and Kiera Knightly pretending to be Russian.

"I'M CRAZY!"

And boy, does Kiera Knightly bring her Russian A-game. She is aggressively, furiously, in-your-face Russian. She lays her accent on so thick you can barely understand what she’s saying. The good news is that for the first twenty minutes, Miss Knightly’s character is demented, so what she says isn’t particularly important. But in the next two acts she becomes a highly literate, mentally balanced academic (apparently in a couple of afternoons), so we ought to care about her thoughts, opinions, and observations. Just kidding; she plays a Jewish woman in Victorian Europe, so it’s okay with these characters if Miss Knightly talks like she’s gargling a mouthful of borscht. 

What’s more, Miss Knightly’s transformation from spastic to sane also seems to have been left on the editing room floor, because when Miss Knightly plays crazy, she plays Black Swan crazy. When we first meet her she is thrashing in puddles and yelling at no one through carriage windows. Then Michael Fassbender decides to let her analyze a word association test he did on his wife, and Knightly is cured, though unfortunately still Russian.

"I'M SOOOOO CRAZY!"

Other than that, there’s not a lot of movie to talk about. Michael Fassbender is fine and Vigo Mortenson brings his best Freud face but there really isn’t anything here to connect with or get excited about. I would say something about Vincent Cassel’s performance because he’s a well-known actor in a bit part, but I frankly forgot he was in this movie until I rewatched the trailer while writing this review. I think he’s the guy who talks Fassbender into having sex with Knightly, so we can blame him for those sequences.

Oh yeah -- Fassbender and Knightly have an affair, and there’s some rudimentary bondage and spanking scenes (which of course got top billing in the movie’s marketing) but this subplot of Knightly's and Fassbender's suppressed and explosive desires  is hardly more engaging than anything else that happens in this movie. We just don’t care about these people enough to care about their relationship. We do get to watch Fassbender spank Knightly into what looks like a hilariously telegraphed orgasm, which is apparently possible in this movie, so this scene is worth the price of popcorn if not the price of admission. This scene is particularly memorable because all the slapping and yelling caught my attention (I was too bored to think straight that this point) and got me to look up from my knitting for a couple of minutes. But then Knightly starts up talking again in her ever-loving Russian voice and I was back to being more involved with my knitting. Some more stuff happens. Jung write a letter. Jung and Freud get on a boat. Jung goes to America. Jung comes back. Knightly dies in the Holocaust. Then it's over.

"SERIOUSLY CRAZY!"

If you’re in the mood for a Cronenberg movie, you have at least a dozen other far more interesting films to choose from. There’s one where Jeff Goldbloom turns into a giant fly and one where Jeremy Irons thinks John Lone is a woman (M. Butterfly), for starters. Cronenberg pretty much canonized the concept of body horror, but it looks like costume drama chamber pieces just aren’t his game. Mortenson and Fassbender have both been in better films and Knightly has surrounded herself with better performers for so long that she’s managed to trick most people into thinking she can actually act. Given the filmography of all involved, A Dangerous Method is a a disappointing, lackluster turn, and it’s a memory I’m better off repressing. 

"Cured!"

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

The Cronenberg Crawl: It's Not Easy Being Racist Edition

I first encountered the movie M. Butterfly (1993) in a Zizek essay on courtly love that I read for a medieval lit class in undergrad. The article was about the bizarre impersonality of many of the longed-after heroines in medieval poetry. They seem to often be just beatific names and faces (automatons, Zizek called them) onto which the more three-dimensional heroes can project their own whims and assumptions on. They are the Bella Swans of epic poetry, the blank spaces into which the hero can insert his own perfect woman under the template of the lady.

M. Butterfly is about a European imperialist who projects his fantasies onto a woman of the empire. At the end of M. Butterfly, the empire strikes back.

Rene Gallimard (Jeremy Irons, who’s so damn sexy and tormented in this role that I ate up his ham-fisted performance like popcorn) is a French diplomat in 1960s Beijing who’s had it up to here with European women and their headstrong, modern, feminist ways. He wants himself an Oriental (sic) woman, a Madame Butterfly, a submissive, sweet-tempered virgin who will worship him unquestioningly and bow to his every whim. He has absolutely no suspicion that he will fail to find such a woman in China and never doubts that he even has such a right to expect this of someone. The fact that he’s never met a woman like his “Oriental” ideal does not challenge his fantasy. As one character pointedly notes, “Only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.”

If that’s so, Rene’s yellow fever gets him more of a woman than he bargained for when he meets “Butterfly,” a singer of classical Chinese music who plays the female roles in the Beijing Opera’s performances. If you think it’s redundant that I specified that Rene’s lover plays the female roles, it’s not. Butterfly is Song Lilling (John Lone), and the female roles in traditional Chinese theatre are played by men with high voices, trim figures, and good wigs. It’s clear that Rene doesn’t know all this the first time he hears Butterfly sing. Whether he catches on  at all during their twenty year affair (this is based on a true story) is left to the viewer. We don’t see Rene discover that Madame Butterfly is Monsieur during one of their clothed, discretely-backdoor lovemaking sessions (Butterfly cites the importance of modesty in Chinese culture and even fakes a pregnancy), but Cronenberg doesn’t exactly go out of his way to hide Butterfly’s identity. With a clearer screen than the laptop on which I watched this movie, you can apparently see John Lone’s mustache beneath his makeup, and his gravelly, androgynous voice leaves plenty of room for speculation before we see him naked in the final scenes. As previously stated, throughout their affair Butterfly will not let Rene strip him, fondle him, or see him naked. After twenty years of cohabitation and the birth of a child, with no relaxing of Butterfly’s strict code of modesty, surely Rene had more than enough evidence to suspect that something was amiss.

For the record, Butterfly is not presented as gay or transgender. You’ll notice I’ve called him “he” throughout this review -- on purpose. Butterfly is a Communist informant, taking advantage of Rene’s standing with Western governments to gather information on American troop movements in Vietnam. While he begins by reporting only the information that Rene throws around casually in conversation, eventually Rene becomes party to Butterfly’s espionage and finds work as a government courier to steal classified documents. By the time their affair reaches its disastrous conclusion, Rene is hopelessly devoted to a fantasy female, utterly exploited by a man who knows how to use Rene’s own stereotypes and desires against him, and a traitor to his own nation and homeland. He is, as Cronenberg delights in spelling out for us, Madame Butterfly himself.

And because the scenes between them are so tender, so tormented, so scene-munchingly excessive and wonderfully hammy, you often forget that you’re watching John Lone go down on Jeremy Irons. Irons’ fantasy actually begins to draw you in. There’s no getting around the fact that the script and performances are ludicrously melodramatic, but I’m willing to let that slide. Anyone who’s ever had it really bad for someone knows that, given enough time, you start acting like Jeremy Irons too, so when Rene falls on his knees before Butterfly and begs her for her love  you’re kinda rooting for him. Grand gestures, big speeches, and sappy declarations are hilarious to everyone but the person giving them. But I believed that Irons was feeling every emotion he was so wildly telegraphing to us, the audience, so I gave him a pretty wide berth. And Lone’s character is, of course, egging him on, so I gave Lone a wide berth too.

"This is awkward."

All this to say: Roger Ebert doubts that Rene could have really not known that Butterfly is a man. Having watched this movie, I think the strong evidence against Butterfly’s femininity is irrelevant to this movie’s character motivations and story arc. Rene didn’t know Butterfly was a man because he didn’t feel like knowing. All of Rene’s dialogue and actions indicate that Rene is solidly insulated in his own world of loving a doting, submissive fantasy woman from the East, and if this fantasy requires this skinny Chinese opera singer to be a woman, then dammit, he’s a woman. Any evidence that does not fit with who Rene has imagined Butterfly to be does not even register. Even at the end when Rene has seen Butterfly au naturale with his own eyes, he still opines that he has been “loved by the perfect woman.” And in Rene’s world, he absolutely has. The fact that this perfect woman is not a real woman is utterly beside the point.

All in all, I love M. Butterfly, warts and all. It’s a fascinating study in self-deception and the blind spots that come with one’s own assumptions about culture, race, and gender. It’s also a satisfying portrayal of a racist sexist jerk getting what’s coming to him, but I digress. If you follow Ebert’s incredulity (“Did Rene’s hand never once wander?”) about this film, I don’t think you’re wrong, but I think you’re off-topic. Irons does a solid job portraying a man who is so deluded, and so comfortably deluded, with the woman that he has invented for himself, that there is nothing he could possibly find under Song Lilling’s clothes that could penetrate this character’s defenses. And as we watch him tormented, suffering, and still in love with Butterfly from a Parisian jail, we’re almost tempted to say he deserved it.

He still has his dignity, though.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

The Cronenberg Crawl: The Bummer Fetish Edition

Crash (1988): In a movie only slightly more believable than the 2005 drama of the same name, a group of car crash fetishists watch their lives donut out of control as they obsessively fuel their sexual compulsions.

For those of you who enjoyed living in a world where no one had conceived of wound sex, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but David Cronenberg has not only thought of it but has also filmed his actors doing it. After about three quarters of this movie’s running time, we are treated to a scene in which the enterprising James Spader gives a fellow car crash fetishist the hamstring stretch of a lifetime when he makes inventive use of a puncture scar in her thigh. Unfortunately for this movie’s shock value,  by the time we get to this highly improbable orgasm we’ve seen so many tableaus and varieties of vehicle lovin’ in the brisk 100-minute running time that Spader’s decision to fall short and hang a hard right on his way up a lady’s leg barely registers as a ping on the audience’s radar. This movie’s plot does not progress. It really just descends. 

"Ouch."

Meet James (James Spader) and Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) Ballard. They’re married but flexible. In the opening scene we see that they have a lot of sex with a lot of people, and they don’t like it. They’re bored. “Maybe next time,” Catherine says hopelessly, after one more anticlimactic tryst. But moments later, through sheer bad luck, Spader make the unhappy discovery that he is extremely aroused by the experience of wrecking his own car. He discovers this by plowing into Helen Remington’s (Holly Hunter) vehicle and killing her husband. Lucky for James; Helen likes it too. Joined by fate and and a shared burden of sexual inclinations that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, they set out into the underground world of extreme fetishism and test their boundaries and limits therein. They meet more car crash enthusiasts. They recreate famous car crashes. They watch videos of crash test dummies and hook up after watching them. They troll the highways for car crashes, have sex with car crash victims, hook up in parking garages, and so forth.

And that’s the movie.

There’s really nothing else to talk about. Their compulsion to have dangerous car-related sex just finds crazier and crazier outlets and manifests itself in newer and stranger sequences. So what’s the point? The coldness and misery with which the film ends (James and Catherine having bloodied dispassionate sex on a highway median) seems intended to preach a message too obvious to be the point of the movie: it sucks to have a car crash fetish. That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows, whether they’ve thought about it or not, that it would suck to have a car crash fetish. So what’s the point? That the modern world’s obsession with sex can be ratcheted up to dizzying new heights, but at the end of the day, meaningless sex is still meaningless? That all the hype and distraction in the world can’t comfort a disquieted soul? That even sex filtered through the wild lens of adrenaline eventually gets old?

If so, it’s a good message, and, I’d argue, a true one. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” But just because it’s true doesn’t mean it makes for good film.

"You know what's cheaper than car insurance? Vibrators."

What you have, then, is one hundred minutes of malcontents showing you just how dull and unfulfilling a life run by excess and compulsion can be. And when it’s done, you feel dull and unfulfilled. Mission accomplished, I guess, but I still wouldn’t recommend this to my friends. 

The Cronenberg Crawl: The Trifurcated Cervix Edition

This looks legit. Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers.

In Dead Ringers. Jeremy Irons plays a pair of twin gynecologists who share a clinic and, unbeknownst to the women they seduce, most of their lovers. When the meeker twin falls in love with an actress who comes to them for fertility treatments, the relationship between them begins to sour.

Dead Ringers is a movie about twins and vaginas. If this leads you to conclude that it’s a titillating sex romp, you’re going to have a bad time.

Unfortunately for porn enthusiasts, the leading twins in Dead Ringers don’t have vaginas. They fix them. And because this is a David Cronenberg movie, fixing a vagina in this movie means stuffing it full of custom-made spiny instruments while dressed like a delegate at the Council of Nicea, at least in the second half of the movie.  This is because Elliot and Bev (played by Jeremy Irons and, when both Elliot and Bev are on screen, Jeremy Irons and the back of somebody else’s head) share the responsibilities of running a cutting-edge fertility clinic. They also share a crippling drug addiction, paranoid fantasies about mutant women, and a debilitating co-dependency on the other twin. They live in the house, sleep in the same bed, and pass unsuspecting patients and lovers back and forth between them without informing these women when this switcheroo occurs. 

If this doesn’t sound toxic enough already, the situation goes even further to hell when shy, subordinate twin Bev falls madly in love with their patient Claire, a famous actress who is infertile because her cervix has three holes in it. The good news is that a quick Google search reveals that a “trifurcated cervix” is a medical condition that exists only in Cronenberg’s head; at any rate, both brothers acquaint themselves thoroughly with said cervix both with and without a speculum, until Claire finally realizes she’s being tricked and has slept with both Bev and Elliot when she only intended to sleep with Bev. Clare’s furious rejection of the brothers devastates the twin who loved her. As a result, Bev begins to abuse prescription medications, hallucinates that his female patients are “mutants” with severe reproductive deformities, and, worst of all, begins operating on these women with a series of custom-ordered instruments that look like rejected props from the Hostel movies combined with titanium beetles. 

You can pretty much divide Jeremy Irons’ entire filmography into films where he either chose to act or not to act, and this is fortunately the former. There’s undeniable power in his performance. Irons manages the nigh-impossible feat of rendering the brothers’ relationship as multi-dimensional and not relentlessly creepy; it’s by turns tender and terribly sick. Irons also manages to make the brothers distinguishable from one another without relying on obvious character foils or stock tropes. For this reason, then, Dead Ringers works because the dynamic between Irons and Irons works. He has excellent chemistry with himself. We believe that Bev and Elliot love each other powerfully and could share a beneficial partnership in their personal and professional lives if they weren’t so toxically consumed with one another. We also believe that their natural bond has mutated beyond healthy limits into a dangerous absorption with the other, coupled with a shocking disregard for all external parties. We believe Bev and Elliot’s ability to both love and resent each other for the power they have over the other, and we believe that they simultaneously long for freedom and crave the sustained safety of their own exclusive relationship. On this level, then, Dead Ringers works. It is a solid film about an unbreakable, consumptive, and tragic bond between two people who share everything, including genes and a womb.

So does Dead Ringers work? Sure, but not as well as it could. The problem is that Cronenberg doesn’t want his movie to be about a destructive relationship between twin brothers. He wants it to be (as near as I can tell, given the tone and third-act horror tropes) a genuinely unsettling psychological thriller with body horror elements. And this is where the movie doesn’t deliver. The average horror movie relies not only on tone but on a premise that that the audience will immediately relate to as genuinely dangerous and frightening. 28 Days Later is scary not only because of the movie’s quick pace and ominous visuals but because of the relatable dread of being left without one’s friends and family, coupled with the terror facing a national tragedy. Nothing bad happens to Cillian Murphy during his opening walk through London, but if you don’t have goosebumps while watching that sequence, you’re not paying attention. The same can be said of older horror movies like The Exorcist and The Shining. Both feature strong scripts, great performances, and marvelous practical effects, but both movies are inherently scary because the horrors that the characters experience are so familiar to us. Isolation is terrifying. Harm coming to one’s child or family members is terrifying. A change in a loved one’s demeanor, a doctor’s inability to treat sickness, and profound religious uncertainty are all terrifying. We find these movies scary because we’ve experienced the small-scale versions of what these characters are going through.

Seriously, did no one object when Bev ordered red scrubs?

That said, for Dead Ringers to work, it really needs you to look square in the face at the world of clinical gynecology and squirm.  A lot of the power of this movie depends on the audience being unsettled by the inherent ickiness of vulvas and codependent twins, and unfortunately for this film, I have one of each. Louise and I are the daughters of doctors, and if I’m going to be scared by body horror, I need to see the horror and not just the body. When Irons says that his patient has a “trifurcated cervix” (go ahead and say that out loud, it’s a riot), I get out my laptop to see if this really happens. When I see a couple of twins cuddling in bed together, I think less about incest and more about the last five vacations I’ve taken. To me this is not a thriller; it’s a family drama about two sad, broken, and brilliant brothers. It doesn’t leave me running for the exits; it has me running to the phone so I can call Bev and Elliot and tell them they can beat this thing.

The creep factor really doesn’t even get ratcheted up when we see Bev’s madness made manifest in his treatment plan for “mutant women.” The surgery scenes just strain our credulity too much. Rest assured, ye squeamish: Bev never actually gets around to cutting on anyone, but when we get an eyeful of his special-order tools we immediately wonder why no one on his sizable surgery team has had Bev’s hospital privileges suspended. His equipment looks like Steve Martin’s dental tools in Little Shop of Horrors. The stupidity of the surgery sequence isn’t helped by the fact that the hospital staff dresses like Death Star employees. They don’t wear scrubs; they wear red Klan uniforms.  And when a fellow doctor exclaims “Jesus, Bev!” when Bev passes out on a patient, we wonder why the patient, scrub nurses, anesthesiologists, and janitor weren’t also yelling “Jesus, Bev!” when they saw the batshit cardinal uniforms they all had to wear to work that morning.

All in all, then, Dead Ringers tells a good sibling story but not a good horror yarn. Maybe I’m not the target audience, maybe I’m not squeamish enough, or maybe after watching so many David Cronenberg movies I’m just too far gone, but it just didn’t come together for me. If you want Jeremy Irons to be party to your depression today, this is a good pick alongside M. Butterfly. But if you want Cronenberg to gross you out today, watch The Fly instead.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

The Cronenberg Crawl: Beth Watches Oeuvres from the King of Body Horror Until She is Blinded/Driven Insane

In our quest to plunge through the canon of some of the most celebrated and popular directors today, twisted sister Beth has been in a contest with herself to see how many David Cronenberg movies she can watch and review in one summer. Whether or not she can complete this task without suffering permanent brain damage or attracting the attention of terrorist watch groups remains to be seen.

For the uninitiated: who is David Cronenberg? This creepy son of a bitch is a Canadian director who, according to his gushing IMDB page, is also known as the "King of Venereal Horror" and the "Baron of Blood." We here at Beth and Louise Hate Movies don't know how many people have to call you the "Baron of Blood" until it is officially one of your epithets, but there you are. After a promising start in cult horror films in the late 70's (Rabid and They Came from Within), he moved on to bigger and better head explosions with more mainstream movies like Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and The Fly.

"But Beth and Louise," you might be saying, "why would you watch every movie made by a man who was famous for producing hideous cult movies?" Because we're terrible people, that's why. But more importantly, because you might know David Cronenberg from some of the OA History of Violence (2005), Eastern Promises (2007), A Dangerous Method (2011) and Cosmopolis (2012).
scar bait that he's made in recent years. From the mid to late 80's until now, Cronenberg's films have fared quite well at Cannes and Berlin and have picked up a number of Oscar nominations. You might know him from his more recent productions, such as

So there you are. Like Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi, Cronenberg has followed a well-worn path from sordid B-cinema to mainstream glory, and has somehow never stopped giving everyone the willies every time he switches on a camera.

We have personally had an eye on Cronenberg ever since we stumbled across The Fly in high school (that makes for one hell of a gnarly popcorn movie, if you're interested), so we're proud to say that Beth will embrace this coming exercise with appropriate masochism and aplomb. You may not want to hang out with her when this is over, though. Stay tuned.

Keep smiling, Beth, you creepy freak.