The opening is full of promise. Behind the credits, the secluded setting -- the swank Starliner apartments -- is established with a parody of a real-estate advertisement: a slide show of the Starliner's many amenities (tennis courts, boutique, medical and dental clinics, and on and on) and a narration spoken in a mortician's mentholated voice. Thus, the target for terrorism, as in all disaster movies, is comfort and complacency; but the target is chosen in this instance with a satirical lack of sympathy. Much of the unpleasant tension of the first half derives from the doctor's-office nastiness of the horrors: pulsating lumps under the skin, a trickle of blood from the mouth, a torrent of blood vomited into a Spic 'n' Span bathtub (it's enough to make a lovely young housewife sit right down on the toilet and cry). As long as these afflictions are still in the symptom stage, undiagnosed, the movie maintains an anything-can-happen nightmare quality; and when the Hieronymous Bosch-ian creatures (repulsive little things resembling sweetbreads and chicken livers) begin bursting out of people's mouths, roaming through the building's drains and vents, and infecting the residents with uncontrollable carnal lusts, the movie manufactures some real squirms. (The storyline functions facetiously as stop-V.D. propaganda and as a plea for sexual continence.) Eventually, the orgy of sexual violence is explained, confusingly, by a stock mad scientist's notebooks, and it develops into a stock science-fiction caution against dehumanization. The movie might have done better to stay on the laughable level of a housewife's nightmare -- a plague of slimy pests in the spotless kitchen and bath. With Paul Hampton, Joe Silver, and Barbara Steele; directed by David Cronenberg, a young Canadian who has earned something of an underground reputation for his experimental sci-fi films, "Stereo" and "Crimes of the Future." (1976) — Duncan Shepherd