Rabid/The Brood (Fri., Sept. 16, 8 p.m., $12, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) The perfect warm-up for David Cronenberg's upcoming History of Violence, Exhumed Films' Cronenberg double bill goes back to his beginnings as a drive-in filmmaker with arthouse pretensions. Following the Roger Corman-produced Shivers, in which a suburban high-rise is infected by a parasitic sexual pathogen, Cronenberg returned to his favorite locale (already the setting for his short features Stereo and Crimes of the Future): a vaguely futuristic clinic where the surgical perfection of the human body gives rise to unintended horrors. In Rabid, patient zero is Marilyn Chambers, the porn actress and ex-Ivory Soap model, whose skin-searing motorcycle crash gives nearby plastic surgeons a chance to experiment with grafting undifferentiated skin cells. Unfortunately for her, them and the nearby city, her insides are pulverized to the extent that she can only ingest human blood, a task that the newly formed proboscis in her armpit makes efficient and deadly. At least that's Cronenberg's take: Rabid never gets around to explaining her sudden vampirism, and the movie lunges at primal imagery without giving it any kind of context. Despite its pulpy premise, it's a strangely desiccated experience, a thesis in search of an argument.

The Brood returns to the scene of the crime: another clinic, where a psychiatric guru (Oliver Reed) teaches patients to exude pain through their pores so their psychic boils may literally be lanced. Wouldn't you know it, one woman's trauma manifests as murderous, mallet-wielding dwarfs (as if you couldn't see that coming), but somehow the inspired absurdity of Cronenberg's premise only makes the movie more disturbing.

Getting Off (Wed., Sept. 21, 8:30 p.m., Showtime) Seven years after playing the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, Main Line native Julie Lynch's debut (then called Remembering Sex) gets a belated shot at a national release. It's the story of Josie (ER's Christine Harnos), a DUMBO artist whose binge drinking and compulsive sexual encounters have reached crisis levels. Set in 1992, at the height of the American AIDS crisis, Getting Off was an intentional period piece even in 1998; now, no one dies from AIDS — at least, not in the movies.

Josie's reckoning is prompted when a college friend collapses at an informal reunion. After learning he has AIDS-related pneumonia, she and girlfriends Brooke Smith and Amy Ryan agree to get tested together, but it's Josie who has the most to reflect on while waiting for her results; her list of past partners fills pages in her journal, and those are just the ones she was sober enough to remember.

Making Getting Off was part of Lynch's own journey back from the edge. The character of Josie draws heavily on her own experiences, and the physical similarity between them is striking (or at least it was then). But the fruit of her catharsis was trapped in legal limbo when Harnos got cold feet, lodging a complaint with the Screen Actors' Guild that forbade Lynch from screening the film, even privately, or showing it as a work sample. Recut and slightly toned down — some nudity has been darkened, and Josie's sleazy ex-boyfriend no longer coaxes her into talking dirty to him — the movie retains its confessional force, and in seven years, the only movie I can think of to rival its depiction of female self-destruction is Carine Adler's Under the Skin.