Satirical social comment masquerading as low-grade B-movie horror.
Cronenberg’s debut takes an old chestnut - sick little parasite takes
over unwitting humans - and sets it in a microcosm hi-tech tower block,
with a 1970s slant (it doesn’t zombify, it engenders lasciviousness
and generally debauched behaviour). This allows the nasty,
biological voyeurism that is Cronenberg’s stock-in-trade to expound
all his preoccupations: the conspiratorial corruption of industry
and big business, the bastardisation of nature by science and
humanity’s abstraction from our primal drives. Fabulous.
