The COVID Canon || Part 1: Infection

In these trying and unpredictable plague times, movies can soothe cathartic, bathe in warped reality gloom, or provide solace in our world not-quite-collapsing into wasteland oblivion. Peep these end time tales wrestling with pandemics, doomsdays, and their catastrophic aftermath to untangle some of the troubling thoughts bouncing ‘round your skull during quarantine. 

Bug

Billy Friedkin flexes as much visual muscle as he can sweat in this filmed stage play. Ashley Judd and (full frontal) Michael Shannon sell the psychic schism histrionics hard, though. Are you infected? Or just so paranoid about the air outside the slightest cough convinces you to barricade before the ambulance you can’t afford pulls into the motel parking lot? A thoroughly uncomfortable pandemic panic psychodrama, if a bit cartoonish. Watch this if you want to spiral even further into a COVID bugout.

Cabin Fever

A stoopid splatter comedy basks in shots of the fall countryside with real tactile grain as trees dissolve into each other and the camera slowly zooms into and out of the sun rising over a lake? What a surprising throwback cinelook for a movie containing an obnoxious amount of meandering frat ribbing and chilling turn of the 2000s fashions. The low-rise flared jeans, single stripe sweaters, dark makeup, sideburns, and soul patches create an almost contrast with the decrepit Evil Dead homage cabin and stunning nowheresville vistas. Call me crazy, but I would be into a more ruthless remake that drops stuff like calling someone gay or a slut as a punchline and dives into creeping sick body horror tackling a very real fear of disease and death in a more novel location. This movie needs some FOCUS.

Contagion

If Hollyweird royalty Gwyneth Paltrow can seize until her brain boils to soup inside her own skull, no one is safe. Thank you, Stephen Soderbergh, for reminding us a life sucking virus is the great equalizer. 

The Crazies

 “The army ain’t nobody’s friend, man.” 

Of course, a series of US government fuckups exacerbate a pandemic until only one last ditch containment strategy remains: nuke an entire infected community to prevent spread. And leave it to George Romero to depict gun toting “Don’t Tread on Me” Pennsyltuckey trucknut hicks as threatening as lying incompetent heads of state. I kind of wish Romero lived long enough to drop a horror movie criticizing the mishandling of COVID or present-day income inequality. He’s the only director that could deliver exploitative thrills while slipping in social commentary any jabronie at a mall multiplex could understand. What do we have now? The Purge series? Gimme a break. 

The Grapes of Death

A frightened woman wanders through rotting French countryside in this Jean Rollin waking nightmare haze about bad pesticides mutating farmers into a scourge of murderous creeps. Blighted landscapes loom large, dwarfing solitary figures as they scramble panicked for help that never arrives. Wide, long takes capture the endless fugue, the soul sucking drudge of barely evading death as it nips at heel. Maybe Rollin was some sort of soothsayer, ‘cause he even kicks the opening credits off with a shot of a field hand breathing heavily through a safety mask. Brrr! 

The Hole

Tsai Ming-liang heads rise up! The Taiwanese slow cinema auteur drops a long shot long take dystopian bomb about Taipei apartment dwellers infected with a disease that makes them behave like insects. Throw in musical numbers filmed in the distinct Tsai removed yet down’n’dirty style expressing the inner yearnings of neighbors in quarantine, and you have a real COVID winner about finding connection amidst a crumbling cityscape. 

The Living End

Your doctor says you've got AIDS and a limited time to live ... wyd? 

Rats off to Gregg Araki for creating a universal death sentence what if scenario. No matter if you're gay, straight, bi, or whatever, the thought of fucking the world and doing what thou wilt after receiving the worst news imaginable strikes a primal chord. I love this movie as a transgressive scream from a marginalized community, a clever sophisticated method of milking a low budget with dash cam shots of high profile landmarks from Circus Liquor to the Golden Gate Bridge, and a giant middle finger to the bourgeoise filmmaking community at large. And OF COURSE, the apartment production design is typically out of this world Araki alt slacker amazing. If you ever felt a cough spike into a heave or felt elbowed to the sides of society or just hate humans in general, do yourself a favor and absorb this movie while holed up at home.

I Drink Your Blood

"LET IT BE KNOWN: SATAN WAS AN ACID HEAD." 

In this Age of Aquarius exploitation shocker, a filthy hippie family contracts rabies and wreaks havoc on a small town full of good ‘ol American local yokels. A pregnant hippie weeps over her frothing rage. A mute doe-eyed longhair, wild with bloodlust, sinks an electric carver into the neck of a poor square. Surprisingly well shot, effective body horror way ahead of its time with enough nuanced character moments to make the indulgent gore really splat wet, I Drink Your Blood shocked me into actually feeling for faux flower children as they lose their humanity and rip people to shreds and spew foam all over the rural populace. I also love how the film is rooted in a bleak post-Manson nightmare premise on par with anything The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or its ilk would later upchuck. Bummer, indeed.

The Masque of Red Death

The way Vincent Price mentions "The Devil," in the most salacious gleeful whisper tho.

I loved the crazy tracking shots (courtesy of Nicolas Roeg) through color coded rooms. And the way the camera bobs and weaves between dancers and lands on Vincent price in a canted angle gave me chill bumps. Waaaaay classier than I expected from a Corman Poe adaptation. And the smart dialogue often tackles real subjects like greed and corruption and narcissism. Satan and God don't care about you. Death comes for everybody just the same. 

However, the movie DOES get a bit too stagey and talky at times for my liking, which deflates the spook factor exponentially, especially whenever Vincent Price is offscreen worshipping the Lord of Flies or making rich chuckleheads beg for gold or whatever Satanists like doing in their spare time. But anytime he's front and center, Masque of Red Death really sizzles like Patrick Magee burning inside of a gorilla suit. “Five gold pieces for the excellent jest,” indeed.

Outbreak

The ultimate middle school science class cautionary tale, Outbreak preens too broad and blockbuster sensational to bite fierce as a pandemic cautionary tale. But what Coronavirus list would be complete without a trio of sex pests (Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, and Cuba Gooding, Jr.) going rogue from the military to save the world ‘cause they’re doctors and all lives matter, dammit! Watch this very ’90s formulaic fossil if you want to see a tranq dart subduing a capuchin in slow motion, a plague infecting Kevin Spacey with his comeuppance, or Rene Russo acting circles around her colleagues only to disappear into a void of Marvel movies. Shout out to Wolfgang Peterson for making the world scared of teeth baring monkeys, though. 

Rabid / Shivers

I always forget the cold clinical idiosyncrasy of early Cronenberg: the static camera, the longish takes, brutalist shadow organization superstructures, sobering discussions about fringe science, an obsession with body rebelling against mind. 

I also love how each Cronenberg body horror joint grows successively in scope and technique and cerebral distance. The claustrophobic confines of the High-Rise* in Shivers opens to the frigid snowscapes of Montreal, and its surrounding countryside, in Rabid. The contained horny maniac nightmare of the former explodes into an epidemic in the latter once Marilyn Chambers hits the streets in fur and hunts. The first Burroughs-like shadow organization manifests in the experimental plastic surgery Keloid Clinic, a stark modernist compound buried in the frigid Canadian wilderness. The sharp angles and stark facade of the clinic mirror the imposing modernist compound in The Brood and on and on and on. 

Basically, I can’t get enough seeing Cronenberg lay his obsessions bare again and again in his early films. In the book, Cronenberg on Cronenberg, the king of viral dread describes how he became fascinated with disease and decay because his dad had some insane crippling illness that ate and spread 'til he couldn't roll over in bed without breaking ribs. What a terrifying thing, a body in rebellion. Pick any early Cronenjoint and lock yourself indoors until a COVID vaccine drops. You’ll never want to be within six feet of another human again. 

Safe

Julianne Moore is afraid and allergic to EVERYTHING in this Todd Haynes “disease of the week” frigid arthouse anxiety inducer. A masterclass in skin crawling dread where the greatest threat may or may not be a pathogen you can’t see. Maybe it’s in the air around you, infecting your lungs with every cautious breath. Or maybe you’re just hysterical and lingering way too hard on mortality ‘cause you’re bored and privileged and stuck at home. Maybe Carol White would be an anti-vaxxer today. Maybe she’d stockpile TP and hole up in a bunker with a gun because she’s terrified of a virus that doesn’t show in all carriers. Think twice about touching doorknobs or perusing HEB sans mask or jogging in public with pals after spying her 20th Century asthma psychodrama that spirals down and down into one hopeless scream. 

The Seventh Seal

TFW the plague hits your community so hard you’re forced into a literal game with the Grim Reaper just to prolong your life a few hours longer. Ever the sad boy fixated on God (or lack thereof) and Death, Bergman wallows in a slovenly wretched mudpunk aesthetic packedwith rotting corpses and sinners swollen with boils. I'm a sucker for down in the dirt plague details like a cadaver crawling with bugs, a witch in a cage, or a parade of grime slathered Jesus freaks groveling and whipping themselves. I could've watched dialogue free death and suffering and Swedes with visibly dirty hands for hours! What a dark and grody movie for 1957! I can't even imagine an American audience's reaction to something like this at the time. What was the big hit here? Bridge on the River Kwai? Peyton Place? Pat Boone was one of the top grossing stars? BLECH!!!! The Seventh Seal still packs a punch as people drown in their own phlegm today. 

Virus (1996)

 NFL superstar Brian Bosworth is a presidential bodyguard who tussles with pandemic crazies after a truck lugging biological weapons crashes into a National Park. If you ever wanted a COVID tinted basement action movie starring a real life chucklehead with a neck as thick as a tree trunk, punch this tape into a VCR and do enough squats until you’re swole enough to jump kick germs into the stratosphere.