Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

March 2007 activity

Total Log Entries: 60

Total Comments: 32

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The Brood / David Cronenberg’s The Brood / La Clinique de la terreur / Canada / 1979

I suppose you could argue that this film rips off Don’t Look Nowone significant respect, but once Frank Carveth asks to join his estranged wife Nola on her new “journey,” we are definitely in Cronenberg country. Of course, the film also has a rather different view of marriage and child-rearing, presented here as a bitter, bloody, and malevolently shrieking custody battle between Frank and his crazy bitch of a wife, in the dubious care of a headshrinker (or psychoplasmicist, if you will), played by Ollie Reed.

is last respect, The Brood joins Eraserhead as yet another horror film about how women’s reproductive organs are essentially weird and gross. But where Lynch’s film plays upon a certain basic male skittishness and naïveté about childbearing, Cronenberg’s film takes a slightly more nuanced (if arguably more misogynist) view, suggesting that — watch out! — children will always partake of their batty mom’s emotional baggage. If this is not exactly progressive, it’s still evident that Cronenberg’s underlying message — that parents are responsible for the monsters they create, a well-worn horror film truism — is issued here with real sincerity and concern.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: MGM DVD
19 Mar 2007 12:23 PM | Comments (1)

Comments / 1 total / Submit Comment

  1. tywilc@hotmail.com / 19 March 2007 / 11:00 AM / URL

    I think you should write a book entitled: “David Cronenberg: Women’s Reproductive Organs Are Essentially Weird and Gross.” That pretty much sums it up, right?

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