Montreal – CIVIC TV

“So… You want to go and wave a half-eaten pickle at a building?”

“Yes.”

“… Ookay! …”

(A perfectly normal conversation, held in our Montreal hotel room of an evening.)

This, in movie location terms, was “The Big One”. To stand outside the fabled ‘Starliner Towers’ apartment building, setting for Cronenberg’s debut feature ‘Shivers’; a quest dreamt of for some 30 years, right back to the old days of holding the ‘Cans Festival’ – an event at which we’d line up 10 or so genre movies, starting around noon and finishing sometime on Sunday, and which Shivers would always “headline”. (‘Cans Festival’, because er – we’d buy lots of cans of beer for the duration.)

Over the course of those many decades, I’d become reasonably convinced that I’d never get to see the building in The Flesh; surely by now an old, cruddy looking tower block like that would be demolished and replaced with some modern, soulless behemoth? Of course, back then I was unaware that a) the building was designed by Mies Van der Rohe, an architect of some renown, and b) Montreal – unlike London – seems in a blissful lack of hurry to get rid of its brutally dated façades. Having the benefit of Google search, Google maps etc. proved that, yes – it was indeed still standing tall and proud by the banks of the St Laurence river; thus was the “post-Boston Marathon Shivers Quest” idea hatched.

This visit was, fittingly, on the last day of our Montreal trip; the headliner, if you will. A bright and sunny morning saw us up reasonably early, and headed out to Nun’s Island (‘Ile des Soeurs’) on the bus. Getting there is simplicity itself; grab the 168 bus South from downtown, get off at stop Ile des Sours / De Gaspe, cross the road – and there it is right in front of you:

Apart from the make and models of the cars in the ground-level parking (“…if friends have followed you home…“), there’s really very little to suggest that you haven’t just de-bussed straight back into 1975, and that Mr & Mrs [Sweden] Sviben aren’t about to pull in on an apartment-search:

Having come this far, I wasn’t about to settle for just standing outside and gazing up at the building; 200 Rue de Gaspe, like its counterpart opposite, no. 100 – which was not built at the time of the movie (at least, not in the early aerial shot of Nun’s Island, showing Starliner Towers stood almost utterly alone – though this may have been a production conceit aimed at increasing the sense of cut-off isolation) is still a reasonably sought-after residential location, and as such entry to the building proper is controlled by security pass. You can, however at least go into the entry vestibule:

In the movie, this is where the security guard first meets Kresimir and Benda (and where we first meet Ronald Merrick):

There were no security buzzers in the vestibule any more; just a rack of local ad papers (one of which I took as a souvenir, obviously).

The underground parking garage – referenced by Merrick in the opening ‘promo’ voice-over, and from which the residents emerge in their cars right at the close of the movie – presumably, we are to intuit, to head off to downtown Montreal and spread the parasites to the wider population – is still there, sat between ‘Starliner’ and its twin:

And, perhaps almost as smile-inducing a discovery as the building itself; if you walk to the end of the garage (towards the St. Laurence River), there between the buildings is the underground swimming pool that features in a key closing scene, still surrounded by the landscaped banking up which Roger attempts to make his last, futile bid to escape:

I sat on the benches and just soaked in the location for a while; I didn’t, however attempt any photos of the pool itself. I could see through the glass that there were families and children having a morning swim, so pointing my camera at them seemed far from appropriate.

“Hey, how ’bout the pickle?… It’s used!”

Oh yes, the pickle. Well, during a meeting over lunch, Dr. Rollo Linski attempts to convince Dr. Roger St. Luc that their old teacher, Dr. Emil Hobbs, is up to strange and unnerving experiments at Starliner Towers. As Roger is departing, Rollo asks him – in the manner above – if he might be not wanting the pickle he had with his lunch? Roger tosses it over to him, and – on catching it and seeing a bite already taken out – Rollo mock-moans “it’s used!”

The Pickle thus became something of a cult reference whenever ‘Shivers’ was being discussed; I even named my YouTube channel “Used Pickle Productions”.

And yes, I really did take a half-eaten Pickle from Schwartz’s in a baggie, that I’d kept in the hotel minibar for 2 days, all the way to Starliner Towers. And I really did wave it at the building. (Or rather, hold it Liberty-torch aloft, in proud salute.)

Cruise the seasons, the sun and the stars, without ever leaving the great ship ‘Starliner’…

Rabid. The title first burrowed its way into my psyche in the very early 80s when, not quite into my teens, I perused the densely printed “catalogue” (pamphlet, really) of Tadley Video Hire – a business that would deliver tapes from a car to your door during the nascent home-video boom, in the days even before rental stores were particularly established.

I had no idea at the time what the film was actually “about”, specifically – beyond its title; and I certainly had no inkling back then that it was directed by one David Cronenberg, who would later ascend to claim the very throne of my cinematic obsession-empire. I just knew it had to be almost unbearably terrifying; a film that I should – in all likelihood – never, ever watch.

You see, in those days, I was really only afraid of two things – that I can recall: nuclear holocaust, and Rabies.

The first of these was a shadowy, far-off spectre; it might or might not come, and if it did there was next to bugger all I could do about it, and roughly 4 minutes in which to do it. (According to the cheery information pamphlets – ahh, ‘Protect and Survive’… and public service films.)

Rabies, however, was a menacing threat poised at the very edge of Europe, just salivating at the jaws (I know, I know) to find its way across the Channel and set up home on our Island. Every summer holiday in France would start on board a ferry literally festooned with posters proclaiming “RABIES IS A KILLER”, and imploring us “DON’T SMUGGLE DEATH”. The first night on enemy soil we would usually not have made it to our ultimate destination further south, and would park the caravan up for the night in a layby – usually one bordered by woods and fields. Going out in the dark for the last nature-call before bedtime would be an exercise in fear; I was certain that from those shadowed depths I was being watched by crazed, yellowing eyes, and sized-up by foaming teeth.

That there was a film promising to bring my worst nightmares to excuciating life (so I thought – I imagined it to be like ‘The Mad Death’ crossed with ‘Friday 13th’) was too much to contemplate.

Roll forward some years, and of course I found the film – as with several others in that heady tome of rentable nightmares – to be nothing like I’d imagined. In fact it is a far more nuanced and interesting work, one central to Cronenberg’s early “Body Horror” oeuvre. As such, it had been on my hit-list for location visits for many years, but this part of Canada had always managed to elude my travels. However, I finally rectified that this past April when – via running the 2017 Boston Marathon and then a brief overnighter in NYC, we took the Adirondack route Amtrak from Penn Station and, some 11hrs later, rolled into Montreal.

Most of an incredibly grey and wet Friday morning was spent walking between various points of interest – including two Rabid locations. The first of these was the ‘adult’ cinema that Rose visits to snag another victim. The original Eve Cinema was largely destroyed by fire years ago, but its reincarnation can be found on Boulevard St. Laurent, near the junction with Sainte-Catherine:

It now resides under the name ‘Club Soda’, and is a venue for live music and theatre, but the frontage still looks very similar to how did in the 70s:

As an interesting side-note: in the main image to this page, Rose is stood next to a poster for Brian De Palma’s ‘Carrie’, the star of which – Sissy Spacek – was Cronenberg’s original choice to play the Rose role in Rabid.

An interlude followed in the Rabid-rambling; in the spirit of holiday-equity, we walked a distance North to find a yarn shop that my wife wanted to investigate. (It was by her account excellent, and she spent many happy minutes looking at all its wares.) Fortuitously, it was also not hugely far as the crow flies – or indeed as the cinephile walks – from another Rabid landmark, Hôpital Notre-Dame – the hospital in which Rose’s first victim is treated, and from which his self-discharge initiates the main outbreak in Montreal. The hospital can be found at 1560 Rue Sherbrooke E, and – as with much we saw in the city – it retains its 70s grimness rather well. (Seriously – Montreal is quite the treat for fans of concrete and brutalist style architecture.)

After the Hospital, we made our way back to St. Laurent and up to Schwartz’s Deli for lunch, where I sampled the much-renowned “smoked meat” sandwiches (delicious). Great place, think Katz’s Deli reduced to the size of a greasy spoon and without so much faff. I mention the lunch stop specifically, because on request they gave me a plastic bag to keep a half-eaten pickle in. More of which in another post…

The following morning, whilst my wife went off to run a 5K over on Ile St. Helene / Notre Dame, I went off in search of the final Rabid-landmark for the visit, the tower block where Rose stays at her friend’s apartment. This can be easily found at 2121 Rue St. Mathieu, just a short walk from the Guy-Concordia metro stop:

As can be seen from the movie-still above, and the photo I took below – very little has changed. It’s still 70s concrete-a-go-go, and even the light fixtures look pretty much identical.

That wrapped it up for Rabid on this visit; there are a couple of other landmarks – amongst them Cavendish Mall – that were just a bit too out of the way to include in my itinerary. Similarly, there are a couple of locations from ‘Scanners’ that will have to wait for another visit, one day.

Remember to keep your windows up and your doors locked once you get into the city. Maybe the bug can’t get you now, but that… that won’t protect you from the crazies.

Tag: Montreal

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