This is what I call a really, really brutal and sick flick. If you thought that The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes were violent and repulsive, wait until you watch Shivers. Before viewing it, I knew I should expect disturbing and weird things from David Cronenberg, but Shivers is such a terrifying and brutal picture that I couldn't believe in what I had just seen when the credits started to roll. The Fly, Scanner and Videodrome are examples of David's fascination and obsession with the flesh and the ways in which technology and sex blend themselves in modern society, Shivers is crueler and more offensive then those three ones and it stays more faithful to the director's ideas because it doesn't have limits: this was David Cronenberg's first motion picture, and at the time he was hungrier (and crueler) than ever, he knew that Shivers was a do-or-die project, and that the movie could mean a ticket to more sophisticated and better offers.He was working into a extremely small-budget, the mother of all creative ideas (Wes Craven with The Last House on the Left and John Boorman with Deliverance).The film centers on a closed complex of buildings infested by parasites that are turning the inhabitants of the place into sex-starved maniacs. As the parasites infect the people, a series of rapes and murders start to happen inside the buildings, turning everything into a living hell.Get ready to witness a man opening a guy's head with a hammer, a woman with her little daughter being raped inside an elevator and a doctor being brutalized inside a pool by thousands of maniacs. If you don't have a strong stomach, stay away from Shivers!
