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The opening sequences of this murky Cronenberg thriller about warring telepaths are so vivid and unforgettably nasty that the rest of the film almost seems like an anti-climax. Almost. This is the most visually accomplished film of Cronenberg's early career even if the film reverts to the narrative sprawl of his first two features. Purely in terms of narrative, the film is a mess. In terms of imagery and ideas, the film is interesting as all get out.

All of the director's pet themes are woven into Scanners: abnormal pregnancy, the mind/body conflict expressed through biological abberation, psychic invasion, medical technology run amok, what have you. The film mates these themes to images so ferocious that, at times, they are overwhelmed. Case in point, the film's most notorious sequence: at a demonstration of "scanning" as a potential weapon, the presenter at a symposium gets more than he bargains for in Daryl Revok, the film's villain. Revok is much more powerful than the presenter and after a brief psychic duel, the presenter's head explodes. The image is repulsive, true, but almost beautiful, too. This scene comes not ten minutes into the movie. The film stages an even more elaborate psychic duel at the end of the film, in which our hero, Cameron Vale, overpowers Revok's mind even as Revok overpowers Vale's body. It's a strange ending that takes some thinking to fully understand. In between these duels are a number of other sequences that act as a baroque sort of styling: The conversation between Vale and Benjamin Pierce, the scanner artist, inside a sculpture of his own head; the gun battle in which a van opens up for a broadside like a Spanish galleon; the scanning of the computer at ConSec; and so on. While none of these has the sheer visceral punch of the psychic duels that bracket them, all of them are indicative of a film that is spinning off ideas like an out of control reactor spins off protons. Unusual for Cronenberg's early work, this has a kind of happy ending, and the film's vision of a telepathic gestalt rather than the domination of a psychic superman is almost hopeful.

Scanners is also indicative of a director who never throws away his ideas. This film revisits one of Cronenberg's early short films, Stereo, also about psychics. Daryl Revok, like one of the characters in Stereo, has drilled a hole in his forehead to "let the voices out."

I used to think that Cronenberg didn't have a sense of humor, or not much of one, anyway. Lately, I've been paying closer attention to how he names his characters. Scanners contains a terrific pun of a name. The gallery owner is named "Arno Crostic" or "A. Crostic." Given that his sole function in the film is to have his mind read at a key point in the plot, the name of the character becomes something of a joke. A pretty funny one, at that. Given the impression left by the film's key sequences, I get the feeling that this sort of witticism is lost on most audiences.