Rabid (2019) stars Sarah (Laura Vandervoort) a vegetarian fashion designer who after getting into an accident is left disfigured and injured in the hospital. She awakes in the hospital and finds half of her face marred, causing her to lose her job and in need of money for facial reconstruction surgery. She receives an email from a stem-cell research and treatment institute that will cover the costs of her surgery if she decides to choose to be an experiment for a new stem cell program.
After waking up, her face is completely healed, and she is allowed to go back to work. She has to take numerous medications and a special drink provided by the stem-cell institute. She begins to have vivid dream-like sexual hallucinations of her eating the flesh off of men and drinking their blood. The victims from her hallucinations are actually taking place in the real world, as it is shown to not be a dream, and they are infected and left with an infectious rabies-like disease, where they lose all consciousness and are turned into walking, flesh-eating zombies.
This film is a remake of a previous Rabid movie (made in 1977 by David Cronenberg) and it, unfortunately, does not hit the mark. The gore special effects end up being cheesy, along with a poorly written script and terrible over the top acting. Sarah’s boss has an extremely exaggerated accent making it hard to take his character seriously. Laura Vandervoort has the best acting in the movie, although you start to not care about her about halfway through the movie.
This movie was hard to watch, and it only goes downhill once it starts. There are many problems with this movie starting with the plot. It almost seemed as if everyone working on the movie had no real direction for it. There are also various lighting issues, such as an annoying camera glare that appears in an alley scene, that was left in post-production. This glare was visible during the whole scene until it changed to an area where the light wasn’t as prominent, making it very distracting. I would hardly consider this film to be categorized in the horror genre, as the scariest scene was in the first minute where a large dog is used as a jump scare.
Rabid’s Blu-ray contains special features: audio commentary with directors and writers Jen and Sylvia Soska, behind the scenes footage with the Soska sisters, an interview with Actress Laura Vandervoort (Sarah) and a trailer.
