The Brood [DVD]

Description

Product Description From famed writer-director David Cronenberg (The Dead Zone, The Fly, Scanners)comes a chillingly twisted masterpiece of psychological horror. Oliver Reed (Gladiator) and Samantha Eggar (The Astronaut's Wife) star in this shocking, intense thriller about how misdirected rage can literally take on a life of its own. Behind the walls of his secluded Somafree Institute, Dr. Hal Raglan (Reed) experiments with "Psychoplasmics," a controversial therapy designed to help release pent-up emotions in his patients. He keeps his star patient Nola (Eggar) in isolation, but as she vents her fury during their sessions, brutal murders befall the people she's angry with outside the institute. What is the connection between Raglan's methods and these monstrous killings? The answer will unleash a whole new breed of terror! .com Arguably the best and most personal of director David Cronenberg's early films, The Brood is an extremely unsettling horror film about familial disintegration and emotional trauma taken to a monstrous extreme. Art Hindle (Black Christmas) stars as a man embroiled in a bitter custody struggle with his estranged wife (Samantha Eggar), who is undergoing therapy at psychiatrist Oliver Reed's controversial institute. Reed's treatment causes his patients to give form to their inner conflicts, and Eggar--whose psyche is at the boiling point from childhood abuse as well as the custody trial--creates a horde of homicidal humanoid children who enact bloody revenge on anyone who has threatened their "mother." Cronenberg's first feature with name actors and composer Howard Shore has its share of gruesome moments, but the film's subtext--how emotional violence impacts a family--is its most chilling aspect. --Paul Gaita