Horror
Movie Index
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Videodrome, 1982 Directed by David Cronenberg. James
Woods, Deborah Harry, Sonja Smits, Les Carlson, Peter Dvorsky.
Synopsis: Sleazoid cable television operator Max Renn is on the prowl for new material. He intuits that his audience wants something rougher than the soft-focus porn provided by his usual vendors. This conviction is deepened when Harlan, his technical guru, pirates a mysterious signal featuring brutal sadomasochistic sex and murder. Max wants this material for his station. Unfortunately, his exposure to the signal, called "Videodrome," has awakened something inside of him. He becomes involved with radio personality Nikki Brand, who has a thing for S&M sex and wants to "audition" for Videodrome, and he somehow becomes a pawn in a power play between the mysterious creators of Videodrome and Bianca Oblivion, proprietor of the "cathode ray mission," which brings television to the homeless and destitute. Bianca's father, Brian Oblivion, a Marshall McLuahan-ish video visionary, only exists on video tapes now. His absence is one more mystery for Renn. Renn himself begins to develop unsettling hallucinations, and line between what's real and what's television begins to blur for him.... Comments: This is among David Cronenberg's most "out there"
films. It's a film that bridges the divide between Cronenberg's early
exploitation films and his later art-house films (significantly, the script
was originally titled "Network of Blood"). Visionary and obscure,
it is a deeply confusing film. The first half of the film seems pretty
straightforward: the movie is a conspiracy thriller. The second half,
on the other hand, is something else. After the halfway point of the movie,
the film slips--unannounced--into halucination, never to return. The halucinations
are structured in such a way that the second half of the film is a sequence
of disconnected scenes that are variations on a theme, as if some unseen
entity were changing the channel at random. As a result, you get the scenes
with Max Renn as the political assassin, you get the weird horror film
scenes, the sex movie scenes, and so on. There's even a cartoon: when
Harlan reaches into the slit in Max's abdomen, his hand comes out as a
hand grenade; this seems to be a pure Chuck Jones sort of moment. The
ending of the film presents Max Renn's transmigration from the real world
to the video world (at a remove from our own prosaic reality, it must
be said) by making his death "real" by having it appear on television
(Cronenberg was inspired by the onscreen suicide of a news anchor in Florida). In spite of its difficulty, Videodrome remains an important movie. The epistemological murk of Videodrome anticipates similar shifting realities in The Dead Zone, Naked Lunch, eXistenZ (itself a quasi-sequel to Videodrome), and Spider, and prefigures the narrative strategies of films as diverse as Memento and Vanilla Sky. Even with this pervading influence on the cinema that comes after it, casual viewers will still pick it off of the video store shelf, watch it, and wonder what the hell the movie is about. A difficult movie, but one that has rewards for the patient viewer...
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