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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).

The "new flesh" declared in Videodrome is not unique to this film in Cronenberg's output: it is bio-mechanical in nature, and represents our bodies and perceptions fusing with our technologies: See also the fusion of Brundlefly and the telepod in The Fly, Rosanna Arquette's crash victim in Crash, or the game pods in eXistenZ. Cronenberg also suggests that the "new flesh" of our technological age is transexual in nature, too, hence the vaginal opening in Max Renn's abdomen (which, interestingly enough, corresponds with the phallic appendage that Marilyn Chambers develops in Cronenberg's earlier film, Rabid). Cronenberg's insight that new technologies profoundly affect our sexual behaviors remains as valid now as it did at the dawn of the video revolution.

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...