Fast Company
On the first, you get Cronenberg's rarely seen Fast Company. Made in 1979 (after he made Shivers and Rabid), it was a shamelessly commercial genre film designed to break Cronenberg into the American market.
Although he was becoming established as a horror director, Cronenberg had always loved car racing, so Fast Company is a simple good vs. evil morality play set in the world of professional drag racing. William Smith plays a driver at odds with John Saxon, his sleazy corporate sponsor. If you enjoy drag racing, it's one of the best films of its kind. If you don't give a hoot in hell about drag racing, it's a predictable snooze that not even a stellar cast (including Claudia Jennings in her final role) can save.
Lots of car racing in it, though.
Disc two contains two of Cronenberg's earliest (and even less-seen) films-Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970). Both are about an hour long, both are silent except for voiceover narration, and both are clearly student films. Arty, pretentious and slow student films.
But having said that, if you're a big (and I mean big) Cronenberg geek, they're indispensable. In each you can clearly see the germs of ideas and images that would be more fully developed in his later films: underground research labs, scary sex, bodies modified with ultimately disastrous results and the blending of biology and technology.
The narration in Stereo (in which several voices read from what sounds like a scientific research paper) informs us that seven youngsters have undergone a radical form of brain surgery that left them with ESP. Throughout the subsequent experiments on these subjects, researchers discover that several things come along with the ESP-from polymorphous sexual appetites, to an obsessive dependency on others with ESP, and ultimately to violence and suicide.
In Crimes of the Future-filmed with the same cast of friends and in much the same style-a dermatologist develops a treatment (of sorts) he calls "Rouge's Malady," which drives his patients into wanton acts of carnality. At the same time, another scientist is developing a way to regenerate cancerous tissue. If nothing else, it's much funnier than Stereo.
Again, these are not exciting films, nor are they terribly accomplished technically. But Cronenberg at the time was a youngster, trying to figure out for himself how movies get made. Still, some of the static images are quite beautiful-bleak and cold in a very Kubrickian manner. So if you're interested in where the likes of Scanners and Videodrome came from, the answer is right here.