poe426 "Their thoughts are opaque to me," coldly notes the androgynous observer Adrian Tripod (Ron Mlodzik, who would make Michael Jackson look manly by comparison) at "The House of Skin." The patients, it seems, have started secreting some kind of foam from various orifices. Before long, the hemorrhaging is commonplace. Tripod licks the secretions from one man's face as he lies dying. One colleague, "once a fierce sensualist," contracts a venereal disease that causes his body to produce new organs. The disease is deemed a "creative cancer" and the extraneous organs harvested (though they continue to develop). Another sprouts a "cerebral antenna" from his nose. Like STEREO, CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is an insular, silent movie with voice-over narration that is delivered in a carefully measured, clinical monotone. There are some grating sound fx in CRIMES OF THE FUTURE that almost suggest we're looking into a fishbowl (and call to mind the "industrial symphony" sounds in David Lynch's ERASERHEAD). This is an experimental masterpiece. As the narrator puts it: "We are now all disciples of a new master, it seems."

icenine0 I'd like to preface this review by saying I'm a big fan of Cronenberg and have seen and enjoyed many of his films (M. Butterfly, Eastern Promises, History of Violence, eXistenZ, Videodrome, etc.). With that out of the way, this movie does not, in any sense, stand up to any of his later work -- poor acting, ridiculously drawn out scenes that do nothing to advance the plot, similar sequences needlessly repeated 3 or 4 times, pretentious psychobabble narration, and, to top it off, the movie is shot entirely on a university campus with a budget of what I'd estimate to be less than 5 dollars.Although the movie is short at 70 minutes, very little actually happens. The length and sparseness of the scenes seem to betray that Cronenberg was desperately trying to fill out time by stringing footage together -- one scene that stands out in my mind involves an unnamed character repeatedly removing and replacing socks and underwear from a leather bag for no apparent reason.If this movie wasn't directed, written, and edited by Cronenberg, whose later work truly is stellar, it would have certainly been forgotten as a standard or even totally sub par student film.

kakoilija OK this flick is all artsyfartsy... but it does have some goodness in it. the characters are interesting, and acting is not at all bad. the script is something totally different...cinematography is not that bad, although some little mistakes are to be found in smoothness.i think that for example eraser head is much more interesting as this one lags quite abit thus becoming somewhat boring.but it does have the same sense as does spider later... (although cronenburgeonerd has sort of made 2 really piece of sh*t movies now... history of violence, and eastern promises, compared to the older stuff) this is a good movie for those who want to start making movies, and critics, and hardcore crounenburgrelers movies =D... but for others not really of any value.

orangeflip "Crimes of the Future" is nothing less than Cronenberg's "Eraserhead". Its flawless aesthetic approach is so superiorly arty and relevant that all of Cronenberg's following work appears bland by comparison --a bit like what happened with David Lynch after he created "Eraserhead". The great originality of CRIMES as a work of contemporary film art resides in its twin-leveled disruptiveness --both the storyline and the aesthetic choices that trigger it appear weakly structured. As a result, the film wanders, just like the poetic mind in action. We are in poetry territory here, not in the realm of manipulative ideological discourse like what happens in "Dead Ringers", for example. "Crimes of the Future" will stand as one of the first true works of Canadian Film Art.