5 years into the future: A global civil war is waging, as General
Pharmaceutics has first taken over the pharmaceutics industry, then all
technical industries, and now they want to take over control - and
thinking about it, reigning over medicine and technology, they bloody well
can. There is however dissent ... General Pharmaceutics wants to win a
brilliant scientist back for its fold, a man they've lost a few years ago
not so much because he's a rebel but because he's a loner and eccentric.
And when the company tries to win him back, it shows nothing but in what
bad state the company is, instead of welcoming him with open arms, he is
forced to undergo all kinds of demeaning security checks that only lead
him, graced with a mind superior to all those bureaucrats in General
Pharmaceutics, to turn the tables against the company and actually cheat
himself out of the job. The scientist soon hooks up with the only
opposition to General Pharmaceutics, the only other organisation well
enough organized to put up resistance: Bikers. And with them, he, who was
never actually interested in politics, finally picks up a gun out of his
own free will ... After a handful of experimental films
(including Stereo and Crimes
of the Future) and before striking gold in (body-)horror, Secret
Weapons can be seen pretty much as a transitional film, as it tries to
bring the weird ideas of his earlier films into a more traditional context
(from a narrative point of view) and anticipates some of Cronenberg's
later undercurrents when it came to his body horror movies. That said, Secret
Weapons cannot really be rated as his best work, its political
messages are a bit on the heavy-handed side, sometimes it feels undecided
whether or not to go for irony, and the whole thing's a bit too wordy for
its own good. That said, the film is still at least
"interesting", and not only for Cronenberg-afficionados, and a
great document of counter-cultural avant-garde, circa 1972 - it's just not
a masterpiece or one of Cronenberg's better works.
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