Metacritic-Rezensionen

The humour couldn't be blacker, and the quality of invention is outrageously high.

Gradually, Crimes of the Future becomes a surprisingly thorough and anticipatory working draft of the prototypical Cronenberg body-horror film, dramatizing, with characteristically repulsed fascination, a series of biological mutations that usher in a micro-culture given to cannibalism, pedophilia, and other practices that indicate a looming erasure of personal identity.

Fans of innovative Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg will recognize the emergence of his unique voice in this 1970 project, the director's second feature (following the 1969 Stereo).

All of Cronenberg’s personal obsessions—the distortion of the body, the grotesquerie of sex—are on display, though the treatment is a bit sophomoric. A curiosity item for hard-core Cronenberg fans.

Cronenberg’s obsession for such matters as bodily mutation and grotesque growths, aberrant medical experiments, massive plagues and futuristic architecture are all here in a convoluted look at a future gone perverse.

Crimes of the Future sounds a whole lot more fascinating than it actually is: it’s a more interesting film to read/write about than to watch, which just goes to show how Cronenberg at this early stage was still closer to a kind of literary, idea-based storytelling, and had not yet mastered the filmmaking side of the equation.