They Mostly Podcast at Night - Horror Movie Reviews · They Mostly Podcast at Night

266 - Rabid (1977)

·47 min·3 clips

The infection spreads through a “stinger” under the arm, and the hosts compare it to cat penis.

1. They Mostly Podcast at Night reviews Rabid (1977), a David Cronenberg film with an hour-and-31-minute runtime and a 6.3 IMDb score. 2. Carnage and Chaos host the show, and they frame themselves as two best friends of 25 years who bicker through horror movies. 3. Their question for Rabid is whether the film’s motorcycle crash, skin grafts, and outbreak logic can be taken seriously. 4. The conversation starts with Rose and Hart getting lost in the Quebec countryside and crashing into a stalled van. 5. The hosts describe Rose being pinned under a motorcycle that explodes, while Hart survives with a concussion, a broken hand, and a dislocated shoulder. 6. They spend time on the plastic-surgery clinic, the ambulance pickup, and the decision to treat Rose there instead of at a hospital. 7. The hosts explain the experimental “morphogenetically neutral grafts” and joke about how unlikely the procedure sounds. 8. They note that Rose wakes from a coma and attacks Lloyd, who later becomes another infected patient. 9. The recap follows Rose feeding on a farmer, a truck driver, and Dr. Dan Keloid as the infection spreads. 10. They describe public-health officials treating the outbreak as rabies, with shots, checkpoints, and a shoot-to-kill response in Montreal. 11. One striking detail is Marilyn Chambers, whom the hosts describe as a porn star trying to move into mainstream acting. 12. They bring up Behind the Green Door, her insistence on profit participation, and Ivan Reitman’s role in pushing her casting. 13. The hosts also mention that David Cronenberg was impressed with Chambers’s professionalism on set. 14. Another memorable beat is the repeated DMV eye-test story, where a clerk keeps saying “read line nine” until the driver is just told to go. 15. The hosts contrast the film’s outrageous medical premise with their own frustration that skin grafts would not fix internal injuries. 16. They repeatedly return to the armpit stinger, calling it a body-horror image that is both memorable and gross. 17. The tone is argumentative and jokey, with frequent swearing, fast back-and-forth reactions, and side comments about therapy and eyeglasses. 18. The format mixes plot recap, cast talk, production trivia, and live reactions to specific scenes. 19. People who like Cronenberg, body horror, and sarcastic horror banter would fit this episode. 20. People who want spoiler-free, plot-light horror talk would probably skip it.

As heard by us

A sharp body-horror debate finds Rabid's weird charm in an armpit stinger, Marilyn Chambers' vulnerability, and one host's near-walkout.

Rabid turns into a compact test of horror patience: how long can someone look at an armpit stinger and still take the movie on its own terms? The review moves from one host almost giving up on the film, thrown by the idea that skin grafts could address internal injuries, into a…

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Why you'd press play

Press play when you want an armpit stinger to launch a gleefully unreasonable horror argument.

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