Man, what better response to George Romero's newly created zombie archetype could be better? Cronenberg's debut feature, though a little worn around the edges, is a spectacular funhouse, a dire warning, a potent sexualized anxiety creation, and best of all, a whole lotta fun.<br /><br />The feature starts with an advertisement for a nice, secluded Yuppie apartment complex, sensually (and homoerotically) appealing to live in some paradise high rise removed from the greater degradation of Canadian society. Class, sexuality, fear, and setting are all established in one swift stroke. It's not long before the carnage begins.<br /><br />See, it seems some mad scientist was using the inhabitants of this virtual Eden to test out some replacement for organ transplants: a parasite that is also "a stimulant and an aphrodisiac". Basically, a person loses a kidney and replaces it with a penis-shaped worm that makes he or she attack and have sex with almost everything in sight... such automatized lust is very zombie-like, but with the added bonus of maintaining language and critical thinking (at least enough critical thinking to not be stopped by doors, for instance). Yesss, it's not long before these worms have burst from the interior of some hapless young man to destroy the entire community into an orgiastic apocalypse.<br /><br />And seriously, if terms like "orgiastic apocalypse" excite, intrigue, or compel you, this movie is right for your tastes. Cronenberg begins his body horror mentality by mixing sex, death, violence, disease, medicine, and technology at manic levels, something he has continued to do for over thirty years now. The movie is a little different from his usual work in that as an early feature, he used some of the more regular tropes of horror film-making such as monster cam and chiaroscuro (later, he would find he didn't even need these devices as the plots and concepts of his ideas were enough, and most of the horror he'd show would be in a much more direct exposition with much more open and regular spaces). The movie at one point literally becomes a sex/horror fun-house as each door is opened to reveal another act found by the mainstream to be sordid and degraded, from pedophilia to incest to homosexuality and everything in between, the underlying erotic impulses of the community is abjectly revealed.<br /><br />What's fascinating about this movie is that it's kind of hard, from modern eyes, to see the end result as being too bad of a deal. The troubling part is the sexual violence and the attacks, but once it's all done, it's hard to discern the difference between consensual and exploitative. Do the characters in this movie, upon getting invaded by the worms, start doing things against their will, or do the worms merely excite a repressed desire that they finally act out? "Everything is a sexual act", a nurse says at one point, describing a dream she had to her impotent lover/hero figure. Such a theme will continue through almost everything Cronenberg would later film, as he would become the master of body horror.<br /><br />--PolarisDiB