Crash is still horny as fuck

Even though I've been a Cronenberg freak from the start, I don't think I'd seen Crash since the 90s. I know I definitely saw it at the local film festival the year it came out - I can still hear those gasps and screams echoing around the Regent Theatre - and it was an excellent fucking movie, but I'm not sure I'd seen it since then.

I always remembered some of the basics of the film - the alluring squeak of Rosanna Arquette's leg brace, the sheer silliness of the staged celebrity crashes - but I finally watched it again recently and there was only one thing that really stood out: for a 25+-year-old movie, it's still hardcore as hell. 

While there is certainly a lot of people staring out over never-ending highways with existential angst, it really feels like half the run time is just people fucking. They're fucking in old crashed cars, on dirty sofas, in more crashed cars, and on the grass verge of the highway. They're all at it, all the time. 

I don't know if they're having a lot of fun - Seth in The Fly is the only Cronenberg character who ever really looked like he was having fun for a while, and we all saw how that turned out - but they're certainly enthusiastic.

It's still shocking in the year 2023 and it's so great that Cronenberg can still smack you upside the head with decades-old work. You can see why it generated Ban This Sick Filth headlines at the time, because it really is sick filth, in the finest possible way.

Watching it with contemporary eyes, that it still the feeling that it's like any film about people with an addiction or fetish, where they're willing to destroy other people's lives to chase that need. It's not their fault - that's not how those things work - but it does leave a lot of human debris behind.

But with astonishingly charming actors like Arquette, Spader, Unger, Koteas and Hunter, it's never boring, especially when they're all playing it so incredibly cold on the surface, with the burn of a overheating engine in their pants.

There are filmmakers tearing away at the same bloody scabs like Cronenberg does these days, but few get the huge attention or distribution that Crash did. Since they're trying everything they can to get people back to cinemas at the moment, maybe it's time to give more fucking a try? You don't even have to crash your car to get off.