Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle and Cindy Hinds
Here we go - an honest-to-goodness horror movie! This is my wheelhouse. I've loved this genre ever since my grade school days when I checked out the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books over and over from my grade school library, which led to me discovering Stephen King later on and a lifelong obsession that continues to this day. To date, I own 426 horror films on physical media and still watch 2-3 horror films a week, regardless of whether I've seen them or not. Suffice to say, if you never read my previous blog (and let's face it - 99.999999999999% of the world didn't), I'm always more than ready for a good creepy time and a smorgasbord of stage blood.
Thus, I'm a little disappointed to report that The Brood - the one horror film that I selected for 30 Flicks - failed to impress the fuck out of me. It bums me out, because I was extremely jacked to see it. The director is David Cronenberg, who gave us one of the two best remakes in cinema history with 1986's The Fly, along with Videodrome and A History of Violence. This is a trio of movies that I'm very familiar with and have seen multiple times, and I know his reputation as a guy who makes bizarre movies with plenty of balls. "Killer kid" movies are an entire subgenre of horror, and a film of this nature with Cronenberg at the helm seems like a can't-miss proposition.
The movie isn't exactly Village of the Damned, for better or worse. For much of the running time, this is actually a very conventional horror story, which was the exact opposite of what I expected. The story presented in The Brood serves as an extended metaphor for the dissolution of a nuclear family built around three principal characters. There is Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar), the severely disturbed wife and mother under the care of a shock psychiatrist. There is her husband Frank (Art Hindle), a fairly colorless guy who essentially serves to move the plot forward at the audience's convenience. And there is their daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds), girl of few words who thankfully doesn't play into the trope of movie children who have insight and dialogue skills way over what their abilities should be.The star of the show, however, is Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), the man overseeing the recovery of Nola after a breakdown that may or may not have been caused by her estrangement from Frank. I was more than familiar with Reed before this movie. He is a veteran of many classic Hammer horror films and was always fantastic in the dashing beefcake role. Here, he gets to go way over the top and have fun. He has good material to work with in this regard, as Dr. Raglan is a fringe psych expert who specializes in something called "psychoplasmics." To demonstrate, the first scene of the film shows Raglan berating one of his male patients and acting like a paternal figure, causing the poor guy to disrobe and reveal welts and sores all over his body. The general idea is that he causes physical changes in his subjects to get them to face their demons. Admittedly, it's an out-there and somewhat unbelievable concept, but no more than Split. It can be forgiven.
The story arc of The Brood consists of a series of slow burns leading to kill scenes. If you've seen John Carpenter's Halloween, you've seen this movie when it comes to the slicing and dicing. Various people in the film who have done real or perceived wrong to Nola are the targets, with her abusive mother and neglectful father being the initial targets. The people doing the killing are also a subject of interest, deformed dwarves who vaguely resemble Candice. Gradually, we learn that these creatures are a sort of asexual clone, lacking the sign of placental birth. Who, and what, are they? This becomes the question of the movie at roughly the two-thirds mark, and it's a good thing, because there are a LOT of scenes featuring Frank walking around asking people questions that barely kept my attention.
As far as horror climaxes go, you can definitely do worse than The Brood. We get all of the answers we're looking for and an effective showdown/chase sequence. The ending contains one moment in particular that got a legitimate "oh shit" reaction out of yours truly, followed by some stomach-churning stuff that will stick with me for a while. I don't know what it is, but visuals in films that deal directly with childbirth always get under my skin. I can watch Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers slice people up into pastrami with machetes without blinking an eye, but show a birth sac and I have to turn my eyes.
The biggest flaw that I noticed while watching the film is that it focuses most of its attention on the Frank character. With the right screenplay and the right actor, this character could be very compelling. As it is, he's just kind of a boring schlub, who isn't helped at all by a performance from Hindle whose one default expression is mild concern. Perhaps it wouldn't stand out so much if it wasn't opposite the great turns from not only Reed as Dr. Raglan but also Eggar as the wife. The script is ambiguous when it comes to just what led to her being in Raglan's care; was it something in the marriage, or something from her traumatic childhood? We never find out. Nola Carveth is a character that we want to spend more time with. Her scenes with Raglan are electric - just two people talking, but chock full of emotion and resonance.
My biggest complaint with The Brood is that I did not find it to be an effective horror film. It is certainly an interesting film from a psychological standpoint, but it lacks the flair that a John Carpenter or Wes Craven would give to their subjects. Those words are surprising for me to type, considering how much memorable, sick stuff was present in The Fly. The death scenes are choppily edited and uninspired, and our hero character doesn't give us the sympathetic punch that you typically need in the final act. I remember reading in the past that Cronenberg had actually just went through a bitter divorce of his own before writing this film. Keeping that in mind gives the movie a bit more weight while also making it simultaneously funny on a certain level. This has got to be the most fucked-up way of dealing with a breakup ever put on film.
Rating time: ** 1/2 out of ****. The ending serves as a good payoff to a pedestrian build-up, but most of this movie just didn't grab me. Chalk it up to being a jaded horror fan.
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