Israel: Rabies (2010)
I’m far less likely to be critical of a film from a country that’s never made one than I am for one that has an established and experienced film industry. Sick of not seeing themselves represented, for instance, the people of the Marshall Islands simply made their own film. I haven’t actually watched it yet, but I’m not expecting the sort of technical polish you’d get from a Hollywood film. (Given that the country is small I’m not even expecting award-worthy acting. I’m expecting raw enthusiasm, though. But we’re some way away from that, and the film only arrived in the post a couple of days ago, so I’m getting ahead of myself.)
Israel has a film and television industry that’s incredibly well established, so it’s surprising that 2010’s Rabies is the country’s first horror film. You’d expect the trauma of the Holocaust to have been expressed through film (although when you can simply document the events without fiction, perhaps it was never necessary – horror often faces the fears society hides from, not those it addresses head on).
I’ve written previously about my theory that horror is the most accessible genre because it shows a society at its most primal – the themes that scare us tend to be those that are universal. The danger with horror (and one I’ve not really acknowledged before, given that so far I’ve only seen a handful of international horror films for this project) is that while it can be very revealing, it can also be very generic. If you’re going to make a cheap film which sells, horror’s your genre; it’s basic, it’s easy and people will watch even if it’s not very good. People like horror. Critics and film-theorists tend to look down on it because a lot of what they watch isn’t very good, but the audience likes to be scared (and when horror is done well, the critics and theorists pay attention very closely, because it’s one of the most revealing genres).
Rabies is not a cheap cash in, so has that in its favour. Unfortunately, it also suffers from some inexplicably bizarre writing. Just because a country hasn’t made a horror film previously doesn’t mean they’ve not been able to view them, so the mistakes on display here are very hard to forgive, particularly when the problems seem to be precisely because they have had other horror films to view.
Comedy/horror is a very, very difficult genre to get right; the balance between the two is razor-thin, and quite often neither aspect lands. If it’s too funny, it can’t be scary; too scary and there’s nothing funny at all. Embracing the darker aspects and going for jet-black comedy is the way of doing it, but crucially the characters themselves should take it seriously. It’s no use having people that veer between being witty, being scared, acting knowingly and trying to be genuine. By all means have a witty guy, but no one’s going to make jokes after they’ve had fingers shot off or nearly been raped. It’s tonally inconsistent and rather than amusing the viewer it distances them and irritates. Rabies doesn’t just have one character like that – it has several. It’s grating and it never feels credible. If horror doesn’t feel credible, you lose the audience. I did wonder if the characters are supposed to be symbolic, but there’s no indication of that. It’s just a deliberate attempt to set unnecessarily quirky characters in a generic setting.
The second mistake (and this is also down to the writing) is that it just doesn’t make sense. There’s a restricted national park which also has landmines? Really? Just…why? Why would that happen? Why would you have roads going through it? Why would you have a ranger of some sort with a tranquiliser gun walking through it? What’s he going to do, put the landmines to sleep? Why is there a serial killer in the woods? Why hasn’t he blown up, and who the hell does he expect to find out here to kill? The area’s restricted. Why are the brother and the sister in the incestuous relationship running through the woods in the first place? Why are they even in a relationship? Why is the policeman so rapey? He’s not just mildly unpleasant; he could work for the Met. Why do people make jokes after hitting someone with a car? If the setting is metaphor, why is everything played as though it’s not? If the writing verges on the suggestion of post-modern characters who know they’re in a horror film, why not commit to it? Instead, you have characters who go from one extreme to the other without any consistency in a setting that makes no sense other than that it’s what horror films do.
I could go on, because the film takes these completely disparate groups and plonks them all down in the woods as though setting up a horrific farce. But as that never rings true, and the film never commits to it, it simply feels staged. It’s not even one rapey cop – most of the male characters are like that for some reason. Given the title and extreme acts of senseless violence I fully expected the reveal to be that the woods were infected with rabies and all of the characters were acting abnormally because they were ill. Nope, they were just feeling like it that day. Even the incest siblings.
The cast try their very hardest to make it work, but no actor could sell this. It’s not a failure of their skills, it’s a failure in the writing, because it’s simply not believable. And if a horror film isn’t believable, it’s not going to work.
And Rabies simply doesn’t work.
Disc: DVD (Region 1, USA)
Source: eBay
Availability: Deleted but still widely available; Region 2 editions also exist (UK and Spain). There's a German Blu-ray, but it has no English subtitles. (Luckily, I didn't buy it.)