THEY CAME FROM WITHIN Movie Review

Shivers
The Parasite Murders
Frissons

The parasites on the rampage in a neat and tidy Canadian apartment building seem like a blessing in disguise at first. They stimulate intense sexual desire among the tenants with more high-powered effectiveness than a pound of Viagra dumped into the water supply. But, alas, they entail far more gruesome side effects than just “blue vision.” David Cronenberg's first theatrical feature, the 1975 They Came from Within, is a gruesome, hilarious, splashy orgy of sex, gore, and dread that features just about all the themes that the gifted director would later explore in far more elegant but no less insistent films. The movie's title is suggestive enough to be that of Cronenberg's autobiography (a superb book about his work is titled The Shape of Rage), for the director's greatest talent throughout his career has been to dig deeply into the cinema's unique capacity for giving a physical shape to feelings—for externalizing internal states. His fascination with sexual appetite as a means of delaying the inevitable decay of the flesh has been the subtext, if not the direct subject, of most of his best-known, most powerfully operatic works, such as Dead Ringers, The Fly, and Naked Lunch, as well as his two most unjustly neglected masterworks, The Dead Zone and Crash. This is where it started, but even if you're not a general fan of this great, subversive, Canadian visionary, They Came from Within still packs a good scare. It's known alternately as The Parasite Murders and Shivers (Frissons in Quebec), and—heads up, Jesse Helms!—it was partially funded by the Canadian government.

NEXT STOP … The Brood, Scanners, Eraserhead

1975 (R) 87m/C CA Paul Hampton, Joe Silver, Lynn Lowry, Barbara Steele, Susan Petrie, Allan Magicovsky; D: David Cronenberg; W: David Cronenberg; C: Robert Saad. VHS ART, VES