the best medicine

Please be aware, Notional Reader, that episodes of this blog may be less frequent over the next weeks and months, since I do not 'have' the internet and am therefore reduced to projecting these words onto the world-wide-web through sheer force of will as I sit in my lonely garret.

What do you care, anyway, since I'm only going to review another film you've never heard of and wouldn't want to see even if you had?

In this instance it's Antiviral, directed by Brandon Cronenberg (no relation). Except, oh yes, he is a relation. He's David Cronenberg's son.

Not that you could tell. There's no similiarity between this and David Cronenberg's films, unless you count minor matters like theme, setting, visual style and – well, pretty much everything you see on the screen. But then, Cronenberg is (in Stephen King's words) the King Of Venereal Horror, making Brandon the Prince Of Venereal Horror. Or I suppose that's how it must work.

Or it could be a 'train set' scenario, of the kind where the father ends up playing with the kid's toys. Maybe Brandon wanted to make a romcom starring Jennifer Aniston, and David said: 'Great idea, son! Just a suggestion though - how about just a touch of celebrity disease fetishism...?' And before you know it, we have Antiviral's grim future world, in which people are so obsessed with celebrity that they are clamouring to have their favourite stars' diseases injected into them, and sinister clinics are only too happy to oblige. As a concept I'm not sure that this holds water – I can't really see anyone (outside of a BBC3 documentary) wanting to claim their share of One Direction's herpes - but the film manages to maintain a queasy fascination despite this.

Our hero (Caleb Landry Jones) works for one of the sinister clinics but is just as celeb-fixated as his clients, to the extent that he injects himself with icon Hannah Geist's deadly disease. Cue a lot of sweating, stumbling, and vomiting of blood – it's a splendidly visceral performance – before Jones manages to turn his celebrity crush into a 'cell garden', a kind of freakish copy of the original that still lives and breathes after a fashion. Funnily enough, this is just what Brandon Cronenberg has done to his father's body of work in this film. Good for him.

Also frantically trying to preserve a loved one is the hero of The Brain That Wouldn't Die, from 1960. I have this on a DVD that claims to have been 'digitally-remastered', though perhaps this can legally be said of anything that has been transferred from a non-digital format onto DVD, because watching this is like watching a poor-quality videotape from a distance: blurred and choppy. It suits the film, a sleazy little number in which a surgeon preserves the head of his wife after she is decapitated in a car accident, using the 'new special serum' that he has invented. Then he goes off to look for a new body for her, a process which is less about matching blood types and tissues, and more a case of touring bars to find the best-looking woman he can pick up. He even attends a beauty contest, before settling for a model with a scarred face (perhaps calculating that she will therefore be more willing to let go of her head).

As for the existing head, she isn't too thrilled about the whole thing. 'Let me die', she keeps moaning, before discovering (or rediscovering) a mean streak and joining forces with the thing in the closet (a mutant creature representing a compendium of all of her husband's previous mistakes). This monster eventually lays waste to the laboratory, and walks away from the resulting conflagration with the model in its arms. Is it carrying her to safety or... what? The film doesn't answer this question, instead leaving us in darkness with the sardonic laughter of the severed head ringing in our ears. Of course Monster Carrying Girl is a cliché of this kind of film, but this is the only time it has ever ended a film as far as I know. Which is all quite of a piece with the film's refreshingly cynical attitude to love, the medical profession, and society in general. Recommended.