“They’re her children. More exactly, they’re the children of her rage.”

Justin’s rating: Brought to you by every shade of beige on the planet

Justin’s review: The more I’ve dipped into David Cronenberg’s library, the more I’ve really come to wonder what happened in this guy’s life to make him obsessed with body horror. He’s creative, yes, but he’s also got issues. And I kind of feel that the film industry enables him without a single person going, “Hey Dave, maybe lay off the human body once in a while and take up origami?”

Maybe I’m not the right person to keep exploring his movies. Except for The Fly and maybe Scanners, I don’t find Cronenberg’s output to be that interesting (nevermind genius). People really seem to fawn all over him in cinema circles, and if I have to listen to one more person lavishing praise on the wooden abomination of eXistenZ, I might go blind from how badly my eyeballs roll about in my skull.

That said, it’s hard to ignore him when he’s so firmly entrenched in the cult genre, and so I’m willing to give a couple more of his flicks the benefit of the doubt. I heard that The Brood, one of his earlier efforts, punched above its weight as a creature feature that just so happened to include a strong dose of body horror.

Aside from the onslaught of ’70s decor and outfits, The Brood finds terror in some weird-as-bonkers events happening around a controversial psychiatrist (Oliver Reed) who isolates his patients for a radical new therapy in which he acts like a “mommy” or “daddy” and I don’t even want to go there. Apparently this therapy channels emotions into bodily changes, and it’s never anything cute like a monkey tail or giant anime eyes.

The husband of one of the patients, Frank, is concerned that his wife Nola is well off the deep end and perhaps abusing their daughter. A custody fight looks to be brewing, and it’s going to be ugly.

Complicating things greatly are murders caused by little children (that aren’t children, not exactly) that seem connected to the psychiatrist’s compound. Somehow — and it’s not explained — the kids have the ability to pop out of the woodwork in people’s homes and schools for some targeted assassination.

Something extremely hinky is happening there, and the more Frank digs into things, the more he’s going to wish that he had pulled the eject lever from that decade and gone right into the ’80s, where slashers were positively straight-forward compared to this.

There’s an unsettling aura about The Brood, from its sets to its characters, none of which approach “normal” whatsoever, and most of the horror happening in fully lit rooms. Trauma spreads all over the place, from the mental to the physical, with the creatures being some sort of symbolic mess that ensues from divorce and anger. Or something. Listen, I’m not a film school student looking to get an A on my term paper. You get into symbology on your own time.

Cronenberg apparently made this movie during his own divorce and as a counter-argument to Kramer vs. Kramer and a look at the radical psychotherapies that were emerging at the time. Show everyone the real ugliness of breakups and how it messes up kids in a shocking and unusual fashion. Like most scifi — and The Brood is scifi to a degree — the outlandish scenario is used to examine a real-world issue.

If you dig psychological horror of the ’70s variety with some scenes that will still unnerve a modern viewer — and make no mistake, it will — then The Brood has a gauntlet it’d like you to run. I can’t say it’s my cup of tea, but I’ll acknowledge that it has imagination.

Intermission!

• “It would have been better for you to be born a girl.”
• Girls were into SERIOUS bangs in the ’70s
• OK this psychiatrist really needs to stop saying the word “mummy”
• This killer is very messy and inconsiderate of kitchen protocol
• Those are some gnarly throat-lumps
• “You are one ignorant son-of-a-bitch Dr. Raglan.”
• The extremely blocky chalk outline cracked me up
• How do these kids keep popping out of furniture? Are there hidden tunnels all over the place?
• You checked out the whole house and somehow overlooked the murder kid? HOW?
• “Are you and my husband having your own private PTA meeting?”
• It’s got no navel. That’s a red flag of sorts.
• Bigger people shouldn’t be wearing turtlenecks
• “She’s the queen bee all right. She’s the star.”
• Kindergarten toys can be used for murder
• Yeah that class is going to be in therapy for the rest of their lives
• “Are you ready for me Frank? Are you ready?”
• That mom has the ultimate Crazy Eyes(tm)