Shivers (DVD)

Ah, the 1970s. Easily the best decade for horror cinema. But there’s always a bit of a struggle for the dedicated horror fan – should one make allowances for the fact that a film is of interest to other horror fans, and therefore describe it in rather more glowing terms than it deserves? Or should one be brutally honest about a film that, although of historical importance, is actually pretty lousy? Shivers was made in 1975, and was the first feature by Canadian director David Cronenberg. He, of course, later went on to bigger and better things, but he didn’t really hit his stride until Videodrome in 1983. But two consistent features of his films have been a ...  Read the complete review

Unless you’re old enough to have caught David Cronenberg’s low-budget horror flick at your local Odeon, “Shivers” is a movie you probably first saw on VHS. Perhaps you plucked it off the shelf in your local video store where it was gathering dust alongside – soon to be banned – ‘80s video nasties like “Evil Dead”, “Cannibal Holocaust” and “SS Experiment Camp”. Yet however or whenever you first saw it, if you even have seen it, chances are you weren’t prepared for it. A perverse assault on everything society holds dear, “Shivers” should have been called “Convulsions”. You watch Cronenberg’s first feature with a mounting sense of dread and disbelief as every ...  Read the complete review

Shivers is David Kronenberg's first 'commercial' release after his previous bouts of underground film-making. Its not exactly the prettiest of movies and is well deserving of its exploitation tag, yet amazingly even the British board of censors deemed it fit for an uncut video release. Watching it you may wonder if they saw a diferent movie, but apparently there was enough of a 'moral' message being deivered here to let it pass. I suppose you could see it that way, but then one wonders where Kronenberg was laughing his head off at the notions they feel the movie if expressing. A critique on the permisiveness of society...a damning indictment of ...  Read the complete review

Conspicuously loaded with nudity and gory violence that seems at odds with the cerebral concerns of David Cronenberg's later films, the hysterical, exploitation-movie tone of 'Shivers' rather detracts from the horribly intimate invasion which it describes. Concerning the release of a human-made, sexually-transmitted virus-like creature into an antiseptic apartment block, the film never really recovers from the sick opening, in which a mad scientist throttles his schoolgirl mistress, strips and cuts her open, pouring acid onto her corpse. Nice. From here on in, the turd-like parasites are everywhere (because the dead schoolgirl has had sex with half ...  Read the complete review