A package from Arrow Video arrived at the shop today containing two titles: David Cronenberg’s “Shivers” and “Love + Anarchism,” Arrow’s Kijû Yoshida box set that includes two cuts of the director’s “Eros + Massacre” as well as “Heroic Purgatory” and “Coup d’etat.”
Cronenberg’s feature-length debut (earlier films “Transfer,” “From the Drain,” “Stereo,” and “Crimes of the Future” were initially included in Arrow’s limited release of “Videodrome” and then put out on their own), “Shivers” begins, like many Cronenberg films, as the story of a well-meaning scientist whose efforts go horribly wrong and the havoc they unleash. The film, funded in part by the Canadian government, was excoriated by a critic who’d attended an advance screening, calling it the most repulsive movie he’d ever seen and declaring that, if using public money to produce movies such as this was the only way for English Canada to have a film industry, then maybe it shouldn’t have a film industry. Despite the furor (or, perhaps, in some part because of it), the film was a box office success, earning back its budget (including the government’s investment) and getting picked up for distribution around the world.