I looked for it for a while, and finally found it, and bought it, and watched it, then put it on my shelf and never viewed it again and that was like 1 year ago or so. Its a decent movie there could have been more excitemnt more rabid people and more blood thye movie is actually quit boring not scary just regular. Its the type of movie you watch and wait and nothing really great happens at all. Rent it first.

This Canadian horror film, directed by visionary horror-meister David Cronenberg, is quit underrated and ahead of its time. Rabid comes off at times almost like a vampire flick but it is actually much closer to a zombie/killer epidemic movie like 28 Days Later or Dawn of the Dead. A biker girl named Rose is involved in a devastating accident and is subject to an experimental treatment in synthetic cell regeneration and grafting. The only problem is it gives her a parasitic organ which she uses to drain other people's blood. And what's worse, these people, when infected, are stricken with a deadly new form of human rabies which turns ordinary people into blood-thirsty psychotic animals.

This is a disturbing and well made apocalypse film. What's perhaps most unsettling is the fact that there are no real bad guys or outright guilty parties in the disaster(government, military, etc.). The scientists who created the rage virus in 28 Days Later where obviously megalomaniacal government drones who paid no attention to the hazards of their creation, whereas the scientists and doctors in Rabid are simply trying to help people and the terrible effect of the synthetic skin graft treatment was not expected by them. It all helps create a pessimistic sense of doom and destruction.

I allways thought David Cronenberg was a very underrated director ,his films are mostly about human diseases or weird transformations this is about a virus that infects a small population of people in Canada. Rose played by Marilyn Chambers is brought into a hospital after suffering through a motorcycle accident with her boyfreind ,the doctors at the hospital soon realise that there is a posibility of doing an experiment on her by using a skin grafting operation on Rose ,what they don't realise is the experiment has gone wrong and it seems that Rose has a thirst for blood kind of like a vampire but she uses a stinger underneath her armpits.
As soon as she leaves the hospital she ends up infecting everyone that comes to her path including a doctor who is preped up for surgery but then gets infected and chops a nurses fingers in half, overall I think that the film was great but not as good as Cronenbergs other films like Videodrome or shivers. What I like about Cronenberg films is that he is always seriuos about the horror films that he does and doesn't add humor to them like other directors like Wes Craven or Tobe Hooper, I hope you enjoy this film like the way I did.

Rose (Marilyn Chambers) and her boyfriend Hart Read (Frank Moore) are two young motorcycle enthusiasts rolling down the open road. Little do they know, a family in a van is blocking the road around the next curve. BAM! An inevitible accident ensues. Luckily, the Kreloid plastic surgery clinic is nearby, where the doctors have been experimenting with a revolutionary new skin-graft! Rose's badly mangled body is taken there for emergency reconstructive surgery. She wakes from a coma one month later, not knowing where she is. When a male patient tries to comfort her, Rose pulls him close and skewers him with the spike under her arm! It seems that a parasite has grown there, giving Rose an undying thirst for human blood. Worse yet, her victims catch Rose's virus and within 8 hours begin foaming at the mouth, weeping yellow goo from their eyes, and attacking others to infect them with this hideous condition as well! Rose leaves the clinic after infecting her doctor, who in turn goes berserk in the operating room! Rose hunts for men to seduce, jab, drain, and abandon. She murders her way to Montreal, where the disease she carries reaches epidemic proportions. Staying with a friend, Rose slips out at night, trolling for victims to puncture. She even kills a guy in an adult theater! Instead of pleasure, his wandering hand finds a piercing death under Rose's coat! She is a virulant serial killer with an inhuman hunger. David Cronenberg (Scanners, The Brood, The Fly) has put together quite a twisted little tale of terror with RABID. Marilyn Chambers is excellent as Rose. I believe she could have been a successful horror actress. I wish she'd done more like this. If you enjoy the bizarre, the different, or the disturbing, then RABID will bubble up your flesh...

Movie: medium

Of all of Cronenberg's movies, this is one of my least favourite. It is like Shivers, but on a grander scale, though I actually prefer Shivers to this. Maybe I liked the phallic/crap-like parasites of Shivers over the phallic "fang" housed in Rose's armpit.

There is some good gore and action, and perhaps most interesting (as Cronenberg likes to point out on the commentary) are his "prophecies:" an epidemic (like AIDS or SARS), stem-cell research, our increasing dependence on telephones, plastic surgery "resorts," etc.

DVD: medium

Picture looks good, though I'm no expert on the technical side of things. The twenty-minute interview with Cronenberg is interesting, but it was part of the VHS release of the film. His commentary is (as usual) well done. Plus there are some stills and the trailer. Certainly not bare bones, but I was hoping for more from this DVD.

So overall, I would give this a MEDIUM. A must for Cronendrones like myself, but for others I would recommend the wonderful Criterion editions of Naked Lunch and Videodrome (and Dead Ringers if you can get your hands on one), along with Spider and eXistenZ.