The Wild Boys, Bertrand Mandico’s feverish and gleefully overstuffed debut feature, is many things at once, and not all of those things make immediate sense together. It’s a highly theatrical coming-of-age story set on the high seas, featuring boys played by women becoming men who become women.
Even if his early “body horror” films have now been canonized as classics (of a sort), and even if his more recent, less outre mainstream work has been often enthusiastically received, David Cronenberg has always been a divisive figure. This is more true of 2014’s Maps To The Stars than it has been in a while.
Today, we take a break from esteemed feature films like Scream, Blacula, Scream to look at something even more curious: the once-banned, entirely odd Disney production The Story of Menstruation, a 10-minute animated short from 1946 “presented with the compliments of Kimberly Clark.”
Is there any living director who’s had a weirder career trajectory than David Cronenberg?
After carving out a very specific niche as a low-budget horror director fixated on technology and the body (Shivers, Rabid, The Brood), he moved on to bigger, more sci-fi oriented projects that maintained this focus (Videodrome, The Fly).