Disturbing yet allegorical, emotionally shallow yet erotically fierce, David Cronenberg’s crushingly warped world of sex, cars and sex in cars isn’t for those who like their films “middle-of-the-road”. Try “off- road”.
James Spader plays horny TV exec’ James Ballard who, following a near fatal car crash with an equally horny Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), finds himself lured into an uncanny cult where ex-crash victims are bound together by a kinetic lust for the very machines, circumstances and imagery that disfigured their bodies and minds.
Taking contentious themes and stretching them to their outer limits such as scopophilia, sadomasochism, serial monogamy and self mutilation, Cronenberg crafts and explores a world driven by auto- eroticism, sexual-oddities and libidinal hungers that feeds on the messages, morals and conventions of the mainstream. A move that’ll come to the delight of some but, inevitably, the complete and utter disgust of most. Those who fall into the latter camp: don’t bother with Crash. You’d do well to last twenty minutes. The former: sit back, interpret and try to enjoy.
Crash (1996), directed by David Cronenberg, is released on DVD in the UK by Sony Pictures, Certificate 18.
