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"Imaginary gardens with real toads" from the very start, a Ballardian satire of Canada's "island paradise." The soporific narrator extolling the antiseptic amenities of Starliner Towers might be HAL 9000, elsewhere in the glassy high-rise a scuffle between professor and nymphet ends in sliced stomachs and slashed throats. The experiment is "a combination of venereal disease and aphrodisiac," the slug-phallus-stool parasite (cf. Fisher's Night of the Big Heat) pokes inside the moody humanoid (Allan Kolman) until it's puked off a balcony onto a dowager's plastic parasol. The bland doctor (Paul Hampton) is the nominal hero, though David Cronenberg's eye wanders instead to the infected building dwellers experiencing their own personal fusions of Eros and Thanatos—the "hungry for love" cleaning lady who lunges at a delivery boy, the manager who keeps an office full of foamy tenants, the bohemian Vampira (Barbara Steele) who receives the leech between her legs and passes it on to her tremulous neighbor (Susan Petrie) with a kiss. The pleasure complex at the midpoint between Sixties and Eighties, zombies overrunning the corridors like subconscious urges revolting against the body. Everything is sexual, proclaims the parasite, even conventional horror-movie exposition becomes disembodied voices projected onto a mini-movie of Lynn Lowry doffing her nurse whites. "Disease is the love of two alien kinds of creature," Salò is briefly visible with leashed youngsters between floors. Are we ready for the great orgy? "We like parties, but this is ridiculous!" The perfect Cronenberg foundation, perfectly disgusting and ecstatic, with a climax that's at once baptism and group-grope. From swimming pool to garage and beyond, the dismay and euphoria of change as car after contaminated car heads out into the night. With Joe Silver, Ronald Mlodzik, Joan Blackman, Vlasta Vrána, and Barry Baldaro.
--- Fernando F. Croce |