The Brood (1979)
advanced David Cronenberg’s aesthetic by combining his early low-budget horror
style with a deeply personal storyline that reflected the writer-director’s
real-life familial anxieties. The film’s
notoriety gained Cronenberg a somewhat bigger budget for his next outing, Scanners
(1981). But while Scanners displays an increase in Cronenberg’s technical skill, it
is in some respects a step back from The
Brood’s ambitious intensity. A
relatively straightforward sci-fi action film, Scanners eschews the psycho-sexual horror of previous Cronenberg
projects, and the uncomfortable personal psychological investment of The Brood, and instead applies the
director’s customary extreme gore to a campy story about a race of mutants with
incredible psychic powers.
The plot revolves around two particularly powerful
“scanners.” Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack)
is a derelict who has withdrawn completely from society due to the pressures
associated with hearing a non-stop flood of other people’s thoughts. Where Vale fears his telekinetic and
telepathic powers, Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) embraces them, and uses them
to spread terror. After Revok creates
havoc at a press conference intended to demonstrate the scanners’ potential
usefulness, a security firm called ConSec captures Vale with the hope that he’ll
be able to help them reign in Revok.
It’s a silly premise, but one that Cronenberg treats with
grim solemnity. The humorlessness of The Brood was somewhat more excusable,
given how closely that film’s horror was tied to both the director’s real-life
situation and his characters’ psychology.
But there simply isn’t much depth to the characters or the plot of Scanners, and there’s really nothing to
invest in. The plotting is reasonably
efficient and entertaining, but it’s all fairly mechanical, and lacking in the
gallows wit and social commentary that gives the best exploitation films their
personality. (It doesn’t help that Lack
is another in a long line of incredibly wooden Cronenberg leading men, though
Ironside brings a tangible menace to his villain).
Scanners lives and
dies on the strength of its setpieces, and thankfully it has enough impressive
special effects showcases to function as a solid action film. That said, the film peaks too early with the
justly famous scene in which Revok terrorizes a conference room. Once the scanner has used his psychic powers
to pop a man’s head like a blood-filled balloon (in an incredibly convincing
effect) there’s really nowhere to go but down – which wouldn’t be such a
problem if it didn’t happen in the film’s second scene. The climactic showdown between Vale and Revok
provides another good excuse to show off Gary Zeller’s exquisite special
effects, but the conclusion (in which Vale and Revok merge bodies…or
something), while superficially trippy, is both muddled and meaningless.
Videodrome (1983)
is pretty muddled as well, but here the confusion is purposeful as it is tied
to the increasingly warped mind-state of its protagonist. Max Renn (James Woods), the president of a
UHF station specializing in softcore pornography, is looking for programming
that will break through to a new audience.
The station’s pirate satellite expert (Peter Dvorsky) stumbles upon the
type of extreme programming that Renn is looking for when he unscrambles a
transmission of a plotless television show depicting the brutal torture of a
series of anonymous victims. As Renn’s
fixation on this snuff entertainment increases, he loses his ability to
distinguish between his everyday reality and a series of bizarre, violent
hallucinations.
Videodrome
succeeds where Scanners doesn’t,
because here the horror is inextricable from the psychology of the film’s
protagonist. As he did in The Brood, Cronenberg made his main
character both a stand-in for his own real life experiences and an audience
surrogate. The director had been attacked
many times in the press for the extreme content of his films, causing a number
of personal and professional setbacks.
When Canadian journalist Robert Fulford called Shivers (1975) “the most repulsive film (he’d) ever seen,” it not
only made it more difficult for Cronenberg to obtain funding for his future
Canadian productions but also resulted in him getting evicted from his
apartment due to a “morality clause.”
Virtually all of Cronenberg’s films up to this point had been affected
by some form of censorship, with The
Brood in particular having to go through a huge amount of edits before
reaching a form that the ratings boards found appropriate for public consumption. Videodrome,
which is all about the potential affects of prolonged exposure to the types of
ultraviolent content that Cronenberg traffics in, reflects the writer-director’s
own anxieties about the morality of his art.
The film doesn’t ultimately come to a clear, coherent conclusion about
any of these issues, but because the plot is indistinguishable from the
psychology of its protagonist, whose own concerns reflect those of the
director, Cronenberg’s abstract themes become viscerally palpable.
The believability of Renn’s hallucinations owes largely to
the extraordinary work of effects wizard Rick Baker (who would provide the same
services for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video the same year that Videodrome was released). Even thirty years after Videodrome’s original theatrical release, the practical visual
effects feel state of the art and memorably grotesque. Perhaps there isn’t a single defining gory
image in Videodrome to compare to the
insane birth scene in The Brood or
the head popping scene in Scanners,
but there is a bigger variety of astonishing visuals in the newer film. Pulsating VHS tapes, protruding TV screens,
and a vaginal stomach cavity that functions as a VCR are just a few of the
memorable sights that appear in Videodrome.
Ultimately Videodrome might have been better off had
Cronenberg trusted the surrealistic images to carry the film’s climax. As it is, too much screen time is devoted to
an increasingly silly conspiracy angle involving warring factions who intend to
use the hallucinatory signal of the snuff program for vaguely defined political
purposes. This aspect of the plot is
justified to the extent that it can be seen as a paranoid delusion of Renn’s, as
the reality of anything that happens in the film after Renn originally sees the
snuff transmission is questionable. But
for conspiracy stories to really be effective they have to seem at least
vaguely plausible, and too much of the latter half of the film is devoted to
exposition couched in half-baked philosophizing when the strength of Videodrome clearly lies in its
distinctive imagery.
Fortunately there is enough of that imagery on display to
make Videodrome the best and most interesting
of Cronenberg’s films up to this point.
While the film continues the director’s line of body horror nightmares,
it is his first project with clear ambition beyond being an exploitation movie. Cronenberg had grown in leaps and
bounds as a director at this point. In
his earliest films Cronenberg had trouble transitioning smoothly from one scene to
the next, but in Videodrome he
frequently switches from flat reality to outright surrealism in the space of a
scene. A creepy sex scene between Renn
and a masochistic radio host (Deborah Harry) has the two alternating
hypnotically between appearing in Renn’s apartment and the orange dungeon where
the snuff program takes place, a sequence that has a hallucinatory power (and
genuine eroticism) that would’ve seemed out of Cronenberg’s range earlier in
his oeuvre. Where earlier Cronenberg
films were largely defined by a small handful of memorably intense images, Videodrome largely sustains its
atmosphere of surrealistic dread over its entire 87 minute runtime. A quantum leap in ambition and a promising
sign that its director could be more than just a quality horror filmmaker, Videodrome marks a clear evolution in David
Cronenberg’s aesthetic.
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