Kinkshaming

Film: Crash (1996)
Format: Loaned DVD on basement television

Crash, the David Cronenberg film and not the maligned 2005 Best Picture winner, is a film I have been looking for for some time. Cronenberg is the king of body horror, and his films are always at least visually interesting. Crash is based on the novel of the same name by J.G. Ballard, who is an author I like a great deal, almost despite his subject matter. I have a fondness for Ballard in no small part because I discussed his books in my comps exam for my Master’s degree. Ballard often deals with human atrocities and physical degradation, a self-destructive impulse that he seems to feel is a natural part of human nature.

Crash is absolutely in the heart of that element of Ballard’s work. Much of his writing looks at people living lives on the extreme edge of existence, barely surviving, but seeing how far they can go while still managing to be alive. Crash specifically is about people who get erotic satisfaction from car accidents, both those that they see or witness and those that they are involved in. It’s as perverse a fetish movie as Salo in some ways, the sort of film you watch with the blinds drawn (not unlike Cruising).

Deep Cuts

Film: Crimes of the Future
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

David Cronenberg is long thought of as the king of body horror for good reason. He’s been off that trend for some time, doing much more mainstream films like Eastern Promises and A History of Violence that have some horror elements but aren’t really horror films. He’s also not done much for the last decade, so Crimes of the Future was kind of a surprise. It’s a pleasant surprise in a lot of respects. First, I’m always happy to see Cronenberg behind the camera, even when the results are less than great. Second—and importantly—this is a return to what Cronenberg is known for, and that’s exciting.

Crimes of the Future feels like the culmination of a lot of Cronenberg’s work from his body horror days. Certainly, the idea of things going on inside the body is a theme that runs through his work up to the point of eXistenZ. There is a lot here in terms of bizarre organic machinery, much like eXistenZ, Naked Lunch, Videodrome, and Dead Ringers. There’s a lot of connection between sex and pain/death, like Shivers and especially Crash. This might be the most Cronenberg film ever made. It hits all of his tropes.

Ten Days of Terror!: Shivers

Film: Shivers
Format: Internet video on the new internet machine.

I have seen a surprising number of David Cronenberg’s films without really going out of my way to see them. This isn’t to say that I’ve specifically avoided his work; I haven’t. I like Cronenberg quite a bit, and I especially like where his career seems to have gone in the last decade, still making disturbing movies without making them explicitly horrific. That’s not where we are going with Shivers, which I think is his first feature-length film. It’s at most his second, and it predates all of those films for which he became famous.

It’s important for me to remember that Shivers came before films like Rabid and The Brood, since it’s going to cover a lot of the same territory. The problem, and it’s reason I need to keep that in mind, is that the territory we’re going to cover is generally covered better in Cronenberg’s other films. That’s to be expected. This was early in his career, after all, and there’s evidence of the director he’d become in this early, weird movie.

Ten Days of Terror!: eXistenZ

Film: eXistenZ
Format: On Demand video on big ol’ television.

I don’t remember when eXistenZ first came out, but I remember hearing about it. I worked in the video game industry, after all, and eXistenZ exists more or less in a video game world. It also exists in David Cronenberg’s movie world of body horror, so there’s that, too. I remember being interested in it but then not really having anything to do with it as it didn’t seem to be that well received. I’ve seen it before now, but I figured it was time to get back to it. The truth is that I liked it less on the rewatch than I did on my initial viewing, which is always a little disappointing.

I’m not going to get too involved in the plot here and am instead going to just give the basics. eXistenZ involves the first public test of a new virtual reality game system called eXistenZ, created by a legendary designer named Allegra Gellar (Jennifer Jason Leigh). The game is played with flesh-colored controllers that pulse and seem to be alive and literally connect into the user’s nervous system, which is right in line with Cronenberg’s oeuvre. Shortly into the demo, a man in the crowd stands up and fires biological weapon at Geller, wounding her. She is suddenly on the run with new-to-the-industry PR flack Ted Pikul (Jude Law), who has never played any of the new games and has not been fitted with a biological port to use the controllers. Now, Geller needs to make sure that her game has not been compromised and the two are forced to explore the game world of her creation to discover what is really happening and who is after her.

Wednesday Horror: Scanners

Films: Scanners
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on rockin’ flatscreen.

Scanners, which contains an early scene in which a man’s head literally explodes, has one of the most-paused film moments from the entire decade of the ‘80s. It ranks somewhere up in the neighborhood of Phoebe Cates removing her bikini top in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, although clearly for different reasons.

The high concept of Scanners is that there are people who have the ability to “link up” their own nervous system with those of other people. These “scanners” are people who are often pushed to the fringes of society because they don’t really have the ability to control this “gift,” and thus are almost always assaulted by the thoughts of other people. This is certainly the case with Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), who encounters some prejudice in a mall food court since he looks like a derelict. The woman making these comments soon suffers an attack that looks like an aneurysm, and Cameron is quickly hunted down and tranquilized by a gang of what seem to be quasi-government agents.

Ten Days of Terror!: Rabid

Films: Rabid
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

David Cronenberg is best known for body horror films. Even much of the last decade’s examples of his filmography that haven’t been overtly horror--Eastern Promises, A History of Violence--have had elements of body horror in them. Cronenberg’s classic period of films contain some truly disturbing imagery and horrific sights. Rabid is an early film in his career, and while it has all of the hallmarks of a new filmmaker working without much of a budget, it’s also one that is indicative of the style that would make him a favorite of horror movie fans.

Rabid starts with Rose (Marilyn Chambers) and her boyfriend Hart (Frank Moore) go off for a motorcycle ride. Thanks to a van that has decided to attempt to turn around on a narrow road, Rose and Hart wipe out and Rose is pinned under the bike as it catches fire. With no hospital nearby, they are taken instead to a nearby plastic surgery clinic where Rose’s injuries are treated by Dr. Keloid (Howard Ryshpan). To assist in her healing, Keloid uses an experimental technique in skin grafting that will hopefully allow the grafts to adapt to their new location on her chest and abdomen.

Secret Life

Film: A History of Violence
Format: DVD from personal collection on rockin’ flatscreen.

I don’t remember how I got my copy of A History of Violence. It was probably from a closing Blockbuster or something similar, though, which means I bought it for cheap because I didn’t own it and heard it was worth seeing. I’m also not sure why I’ve never gotten around to it before now. I think it’s because I often don’t look to my collection for this blog because I know I can watch those whenever I want, and I don’t know that I’ll always have access to other films. But I like David Cronenberg as a director and I like a lot of the cast, so I went into this with high hopes.

Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is an average husband and father living in small town Indiana. Tom runs a local diner and helps his wife Edie (Maria Bello) take care of their kids Jack (Ashton Holmes) and young Sarah (Heidi Hayes). Life seems pretty normal for them, despite Jack having a bully problem in high school. The family is generally happy and things are fine. That is until one day a couple of strangers walk into the diner. These men, Leland (Stephen McHattie) and Billy (Greg Bryk) intend to rob the diner, and based on the short scene at the start of the film, kill everyone inside. Little do they know that Tom Stall has some skills. He smashes one in the face with a coffee pot, comes up with the gun and shoots them both down despite being stabbed through the foot at one point.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Brood

Film: The Brood
Format: Internet video on laptop.

When you write about a David Cronenberg movie, you have to be prepared for the body horror. That’s beyond a cliché when it comes to talking about Cronenberg, particularly in his earlier years. There are a few films that are deep enough that body horror can be touched on without being the main theme of the review. That’s not the case with The Brood, since this is a film that is almost exclusively about building up to the last 15 minutes and one of Cronenberg’s most disturbing scenes. In fact, I might go so far as to say that The Brood is much more a psychological thriller until we get to the final act, when it goes full-on into horror.

We start with some rather ridiculous psychological premises. Dr. Hal Raglan (square-headed Oliver Reed) has developed a new technique he calls psychoplasmics. Essentially, he forces his patients to undergo traumas from their past, which then manifest on their skin as welts, bruises, cuts, and other sundry injuries. His prize patient is Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar), who is dealing with an alcoholic and abusive mother, and alcoholic and weak-willed father, and an estranged husband. Part of her worries with her husband Frank (Art Hindle) concerns custody of their daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds). For now, Candice stays with her on weekends, but when she returns with scratches and bruises, Frank wants to put a stop to those visits.

Off Script: The Dead Zone

Film: The Dead Zone
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on The Nook.

The Dead Zone is one of those movies that tends to be classified as horror but isn’t really a horror movie. My opinion is that the main reason for this classification is that it was made in the ‘80s by David Cronenberg. This is out of Cronenberg’s wheelhouse in a lot of respects. Typically, especially in this part of his career, he’s all about the body horror. There are a few elements of that here, but The Dead Zone is far more psychological thriller than it is anything else. This style frequently gets tagged as horror as well, so that might explain the label.

Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken in one of his more memorable roles) is an average guy, a teacher at a local school. He is engaged to Sarah (Brooke Adams) and planning to marry her. After a night at a carnival, she invites him to stay the night, but he heads for home instead. On the way home, Johnny is involved in a freak accident and spends the next five years in a coma. When he awakens, he has an unexplainable psychic gift. Physical contact with another person allows him to see events in that person’s past or future.

Eastern Promises

Film: Eastern Promises
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

I’d seen Eastern Promises before, and I wasn’t looking forward to seeing it again. That’s not because it’s a bad movie; on the contrary, it’s a great film. It’s one of the best films of David Cronenberg’s career. No, the problem here is that it’s brutal and completely realistic. There are certain things that can happen in a film that bother me terribly. I can see blood and guts without any problem, but seeing someone get his or her throat cut really bothers me. Cronenberg, with his love of body horror, doesn’t just have people get their throats cut; he makes us really look at it. This is to say nothing of the brutal fight in the bathhouse. This is the definition of a hard watch.

Eastern Promises is almost a film noir, albeit an astonishingly brutal one. It starts simply and quickly devolves into something horrible but fascinating. A young girl is taken to the hospital because she is bleeding. It turns out she is both underage and pregnant and about to give birth. Complications in the birth kill her, but the baby survives, a Jane Doe at birth. All of this is watched by Anna (Naomi Watts), a midwife who works at the hospital. She finds a diary written in Russian on the girl’s body and takes it to her uncle Stepan (Jerzy Skolimowski) to have it translated. He balks after reading a few pages, since those few pages are filled with accounts of drugs, prostitution, and rape.

Off Script: Dead Ringers

Film: Dead Ringers
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I would imagine that pulling off a convincing double performance is incredibly difficult. A good believable single performance doesn’t always happen, so attempting that with two different characters must be extremely challenging. When it comes to great twin performances, to my mind, the trick is making sure that the viewers know which twin is active at any given time. This, more than anything, is the brilliance of what Jeremy Irons does in Dead Ringers. For the bulk of the film, it is possible to tell which of our two identical twin pseudo-protagonists is which. Irons pulls this off with a minimum of cosmetic gimcrackery and virtually all of it with intelligent use of expression and demeanor.

Irons plays both Elliot and Beverly Mantle, a pair of twin gynecologists. Identical to all outward appearance, the two are radically different in personality and temperament. Elliot is outgoing and a bit smarmy. He is the face of their posh fertility clinic while Beverly tends to spend more time working on his research. The two are honored while still in college thanks to the creation of a new surgical instrument of their design. They appear to be destined for greatness, and after college open up their private practice.

Time Flies Like an Arrow; Fruit Flies Like a Banana

Film: The Fly
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on middlin’-sized living room television.


Way back in January, I made the comment that movie remakes suck as a rule, and I stand by that comment. Most of the time, if something is a remake, it’s going to suck. Even if it doesn’t suck, the chances are extremely good that it will not be up to par with the original. Most of the time, something gets lost in the translation. Even a well-made, intelligent remake usually pales in comparison with what came first. The remake of The Manchurian Candidate, for instance, had a great cast and was nicely realized…but the original was better.

There are those celluloid genetic freaks that shine out above their predecessors, though. What everyone thinks of as the definitive version of The Maltese Falcon is actually the third time that story was adapted for the screen, and the second time under that name. It’s possible for a film to improve with a remake. They just usually don’t.

One of those improved films is David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly. A campy B-movie when originally made, the 1986 version is streamlined, aggressive, frightening, and pulls no punches in terms of genuine scare and gross-out effects. It’s also a film right in Cronenberg’s wheelhouse; he has a favorite theme, and this one falls right into that theme’s sweet spot.

We start at a science conference where reporter Veronica (Geena Davis) is interviewing a socially backward, slightly maladjusted scientist named Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum). He tells her that what he is working on is going to change the world in a very real way, and that she should come and see it, forgetting about the rest of her appointments. She relents after a little struggle, and he takes her back to his lab.

His invention truly does have the ability to change the world. He’s created teleportation. He can move things from one pod to the other—a distance of 15 feet—with a lot of energy and a computer running the system. The one flaw he has is that he can’t move living material, which he demonstrates to a messy conclusion with a baboon. Desperate to keep his work a secret and give Veronica a reason not to publish yet, Brundle invites her to observe his work and write a book on the discovery. She agrees, and the two quickly become an item.

All of this seems to irritate Veronica’s boss, Stathis Borans (John Getz). He’s the editor of the magazine she writes for, and the two of them used to be an item of the friends-with-benefits variety. Borans is nicely named in the sense that he’s boorish, a lout, and a pig. In the real world, he’d be guilty of multiple counts of sexual harassment, but we’re in movie world now, so we’ll let that slide as simply defining the man’s character.

In the way that science seems to work in films, Brundle has a breakthrough and figures out how to teach the computer to understand the nuances of living tissue. He sends through another baboon, this time successfully, meaning that not only has he put FedEx out of business, he’s also managed to put airlines into the homeless shelter as well. He’s not ready to celebrate until he takes the jump, and he wants to wait to make sure the baboon is okay. However, when he believes that Veronica has gone back to the smarmy arms of Stathis, he gets drunk and teleports himself. Unfortunately for him, when he got into the pod, there was a fly with him—but the fly isn’t there when he gets out.

Brundle immediately starts to change. These changes are good initially. He is filled with energy and life, new strength and agility, and (we discover shortly thereafter) superhuman sexual stamina. The changes continue, though, and he slowly starts to deteriorate physically, a process that we witness in the audience in stages. Everything gets even more complicated when Veronica discovers that she is pregnant with Brundle’s child, and she isn’t sure if she got pregnant before or after he fused with the invading insect.

There’s a lot that works here, even if the premise is a little goofy. The chemistry between real-life (at the time) couple Davis and Goldblum is real, and this plays very much as one of the strengths of the film. They’re a cute couple together here, and entirely believable. Goldblum plays characters that are vaguely off in one direction or another very well, and Seth Brundle is off center in most directions, making this one of his best screen roles. Initially, he is what my wife calls “a-dork-able,” and that’s all well and good. It’s under the pounds of prosthetic makeup in the middle and late parts of the film, though, that his performance really shines. Spastic movements and eye rolling that should play as overacting at the very least instead come off as realistic and true under the circumstances.

Cronenberg, as mentioned above, is completely in his element here. Over and over, his films probe the idea of the betrayal of people by their bodies. Crash (based on the Ballard novel, not the film of the same name that won a metric ton of Oscars a few years ago), Naked Lunch, Dead Ringers, Videodrome, Scanners, and on and on in the man’s catalog, this basic idea pops up again and again, here no less than anywhere else. He took it in a different direction in Videodrome and went a lot further in Naked Lunch, but here, the betrayal of the human body by something terribly other is one of the most central ideas. Brundle tampers with the natural world, and the natural world tampers back, and a lot more efficiently.

Despite the age of the film, the makeup effects still hold up. The complete transformation of Brundle to critter perhaps doesn’t work as well as it once did, but for the entire time that Goldblum is under the makeup, it still looks great. This is one of the better features of the film; each time we return to his lab, he has gone through additional physical transformations, almost teasing us with what he will look like next. The only thing guaranteed is that each time we see him, it’s going to be worse, more extreme, and more horrible.

There are certainly some shock moments here, and the film is not for the faint of heart. Three scenes stand out—the arm wrestling scene, the birth of the Brundle baby, and the battle between Stathis and Brundle at the end (notice how I did that without spoilers?). These take the film from its roots as a B-movie with silly costumes and push it toward that horror title it really wants. While nasty, this isn’t what makes this a horror film, though. What does is the battle between Brundle and his fading humanity.

It helps that we care about the characters, even though most of the people in the film are walk-ons with a couple of screen minutes. We learn to like Seth Brundle; we learn that Veronica is a good person who cares deeply for this strange scientist. Even Stathis gets both penance for his wicked ways and redemption by the end of the film. It ends the right way, with the characters where they should be.

All in all, it’s a film not to be missed. Even if you have a weak stomach for film gross-out, The Fly is worth watching. You’ll just need to do it through your fingers a few times.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting that while I watched this from NetFlix, I do own a copy. My copy is on VHS, though, and I didn’t feel like digging it out, especially when the streaming version was so darn convenient.

Why to watch The Fly: Cronenberg’s major theme knocked out of the stadium, let alone the playing field.
Why not to watch: More entomology than you care to know.

Head Trips

Films: Manhunter, Naked Lunch
Format: DVDs from Rockford Public Library on middlin’-sized living room television

Sometimes plans don’t work out. My original plan for the night was to do a Hannibal Lector double feature—the original screen adaptation of the character as well as the most famous version of the character. Sadly, my VCR ate my tape of Silence of the Lambs immediately after I finished watching Manhunter. But we adapt, we change, we do something else instead. So rather than making today about Hannibal the Cannibal, I’ve decided instead to look at the weird and the offbeat.

Manhunter, as mentioned above, is the first film ever made featuring the character of Hannibal. This is not the character you are expecting if all you’ve seen is Silence of the Lambs. For starters, in this film, his name is spelled Lecktor. Second, and critical, is that in this film the bad doctor is played by noted actor Brian Cox, of whom I am a huge fan.

If you are a Hannibal fan, this is a story you’ve seen before, because it was remade as Red Dragon, which is also the name of the book the film is based on. It is, much like Silence, the story of an FBI agent trailing a serial killer and getting help from the depraved killer in prison. The agent here is William Graham (William Peterson), who is also the man who caught Lecktor in the first place. The case caused Graham to break with reality and retire from the Bureau. Graham’s specialty was (and to some extent still is) profiling. To profile killers, though, he needs to get deep inside their mind, essentially seeing what they see, and in some cases becoming what they become.

Graham is pulled from retirement by Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina), who needs help with a new serial killer. The killer is known by the FBI as the Tooth Fairy because he bites his victims. His victims are entire families, always cut down in a group during the full moon. Based on two crime scenes, the FBI knows quite a bit about the man (who is disturbingly played by Tom Noonan). They know he is very tall and blonde; they know his shoe size and his fascination with the lunar phase. What they don’t know is how he chooses his victims or where he will strike next.

Enlisted in finding the killer is a reporter for a National Enquirer-style paper called the Tattler. The reporter, played by Stephen Lang, is a creep and willing to do anything for a story. More important for Graham, the FBI discovers that the Tooth Fairy has been corresponding with Lecktor through the Tattler’s personal ads. To get the killer into the open, Graham feeds Lang false information, which leads to a terrifying confrontation between the reporter and the killer—one of the great scenes in the film.

While Graham and team become frustrated by the lack of movement on their case, the Tooth Fairy’s real identity—Francis Dollarhyde—has a change in his own life. While on the one hand he believes himself to be becoming something more than he was through his killings, he also finds someone who he believes can make him happy. This is Reba McClane (Joan Allen), who works at the same film processing studio he does, despite her being blind. Francis connects with her, but also feels betrayed by her, and puts her into his sites just as Graham begins to understand precisely what motivates the man.

It’s a good story. The real selling point, though, is a very different take on the Hannibal character. Cox isn’t in the film much, but he casts a long shadow over it. We gain terrific insight into the man when he uses his one phone call a week to discover the home address of Graham and his family, and then sends an encrypted message to the Tooth Fairy telling him to find and destroy Graham’s wife and son. He is a very different take on the character than is Anthony Hopkins’s version. Cox’s Lecktor is cold and calculating. He is filled with equal parts feigned innocence and malice disguised by concern. It’s such a different take that his version was overwhelmed by that of Hopkins in later films.

As for Naked Lunch, you tell me. The book it is loosely based on, or at least named after, was thought to be unfilmable until David Cronenberg attempted it. He evidently found it unfilmable as well and included several other books by Burroughs as well as aspects of Burroughs’s real life into something that is less a narrative and more an two-hour long fever dream of hallucination.

Bill Lee (Peter Weller) is an exterminator whose wife Joan (Judy Davis) has become addicted to the bug powder he uses to kill roaches. Bill himself is showing signs of addiction to the bug powder himself and begins to have significant hallucinations that center around gigantic bugs, many of which manifest themselves as bug-machine hybrids.

One day, Lee comes home to find his wife having sex with one of his friends while another friend reads droning poetry. Lee has been instructed by one of his hallucinatory giant bugs to kill his wife (and to make it…tasty…), so he shoots her in the head while playing “William Tell.” He flees, at least in his mind, to a place called Interzone, which is also the headquarters of an organization called Interzone Incorporated.

It seems that Lee is an agent for the bugs, and has been sent to Interzone to write reports on his typewriter, which is also a giant bug, and also his contact for the agency he works for. However, in the real world, it turns out that he has been mailing his “reports” to one of his friends, who has shown it to a publisher, who wants to publish it under the name of Naked Lunch. Along the way, Lee also encounters Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider), who might be a doctor and might also be in charge of a drug running conspiracy, shipping a drug called “black meat” made from gigantic Brazilian aquatic centipedes. He encounters Joan Frost, who is a dead ringer (no pun intended) for his dead wife. This Joan is married to Tom Frost (Ian Holm), who might be an Interzone agent, or could be just a hallucination.

The film is both real and unreal, existing in the real world as well as the vaguely Arabic Interzone of Bill Lee’s subconscious mind. I don’t get it. I’m also not sure if I like it. This is the second time I’ve watched this film, and just like the first time, it gave me a headache that required multiple ibuprofen to conquer.

I can’t make it make sense. I defy anyone to—even Cronenberg.

Why to watch Manhunter: The original take on Hannibal Lec(k)t(o)r.
Why not to watch: Thirty minutes of Inna-Gadda-Da-Vita.

Why to watch Naked Lunch: I don’t know.
Why not to watch: I don’t know this, either.

All Hail the New Flesh

Film: Videodrome
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

Ask me who is underrated as a director and I’d have a couple of answers for you. Guillermo del Toro certainly rates on this list for me, as does David Fincher, who never gets the acclaim he should. No one is more underrated in my opinion than David Cronenberg, though. Perhaps no other director has done more with less and done it well than Cronenberg. Few of his films are weirder or more interesting than Videodrome, which is oddly prophetic in places.

Max Renn (James Woods) is a sleazy manager of an equally sleazy television station called CCTV in Toronto. He makes his living showing soft-core porn and extreme violence. Nothing is ever “tough” enough for him, and he’s always looking to find something more. In addition to his television station, Renn also runs a pirate TV lab that pulls in signals from the rest of the world. The man who works here, Harlan (Peter Dvorsky), has uncovered something he thinks Renn might like. Apparently streaming from Malaysia, the video feed depicts a woman being brutally tortured, and it’s impossible to tell if it’s the real thing or faked.

Renn is later a guest on a television program where he defends himself and his station to a psychologist named Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry) and a man who calls himself Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley). O’Blivion won’t appear in person, but instead is on camera on a television set, claiming that he’ll only appear on television if he’s on another television. Max chats up Nicki, ignoring O’Blivion.

More investigating into the strange signal, which is evidently called “Videodrome” is not coming from Malaysia, but Pittsburgh. Max hooks up (in the modern parlance) with Nicki, and shows her the program. As it turns out, Nicki, the helpful, caring radio psychologist is also a masochist and is intensely turned on by the show. She has evidence of recent cuts from sex partners on her body and invites Max to cut her, something he’s not sure he’s really into. And as the conversation continues, it becomes apparent that she would love to be a “contestant” on Videodrome herself. Max buys into the pain thing, and while the tape plays on behind them, the two get freaky in a very real sense. I’ll just say that it involves very long needles, and serves as yet another reminder as to why I remain without piercings.

Max’s desire to track down the show conflicts with his desire to keep Nicki away from it. When she goes on assignment to Pittsburgh and doesn’t return, he’s now far more involved than he’d like to be. Through his connection Masha (Lynne Gorman), he finds out more about the rogue program. Masha is convinced that there are no actors involved—it’s snuff television—and she tells him the name she found is none other than Brian O’Blivion, the professor from the television.

In tracking down Brian O’Blivion, Max finds his daughter, Bianca (Sonja Smits), who runs a mission for the homeless that encourages the people to watch hours and hours of television. It seems Brian O’Blivion no longer engages in conversation, but he does send Max a tape that changes everything. Actually, everything changes before he even watches the tape. When he takes it out of the box, it begins breathing.

What follows, the better part of an hour, is something like a fever dream as Max begins to hallucinate and neither he nor the viewer is ever certain if what is happening on screen is real or a bizarre, irrational fantasy. O’Blivion is evidently killed on the tape by a masked attacker, who turns out to be Nicki.

This synopsis covers less than the first half of this movie. For a B-movie, it’s pretty dense, which is one of the reasons I love Cronenberg’s work. It falls directly into the heart of the majority of Cronenberg’s work, which has always been about our relationships with our own bodies. Much of his work touches on this at least tangentially, and much of his best work sees it as a central theme—The Fly, for instance, is all about the betrayal of our own bodies, as were Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch. Here, the theme appears central due to all of the extreme body modification that takes place, but I think it’s actually not the central point of the film.

What is central here is our relationship with media, and television in particular. In the Videodrome world, this obsession is a costly one, one that will eventually kill us all. It’s also where Cronenberg appears the most prescient. O’Blivion is usually his messenger for these prophecies—like how one day we’ll all have special names that we use (like on the Internet), or how what we see on television becomes reality for us, more real than what we experience in our daily lives.

Videodrome is a troubling movie. It asks difficult, real questions and offers few, if any, answers. It’s also disturbing because many of its images are terribly disturbing as well, and while some of the effects don’t really hold up after 27 years, some of them definitely do. The obvious disturbing stuff is the physical alterations Max Renn goes through—the gigantic stomach/vagina is the most iconic—but there’s a lot here that is viscerally disturbing and more that is emotionally and philosophically disturbing.

What sells Videodrome is that it’s more relevant now than it was when it was made.

Why to watch Videodrome: Prophetic vision of our relationship with video.
Why not to watch: Two words: stomach/vagina.