Review of Scanners (1981) by David B — 14 May 2012

All this should give fans of David Cronenberg's previous pix their money's worth, although lack of any rooting interest vitiates any possible suspense and highly elegant visual style works against much shock value and even though it's part conspiracy thriller, part political tract, it is Cronenberg's most coherent movie to date, drawing a dark (but bland) world in which corporate executives engineer human conception to produce ever more powerful mental samurai.

Though shocking and a bit gory for it's time, it has rather dated and the shocks are more laughable than actuall shocking,but it's still a great cult film to watch but Scanners is so lockstep that we are basically reduced to watching the special effects, which are good but curiously abstract, because we don't much care about the people they're happening around.

The quality of the film's inventiveness is not always of the first order, which is too bad because Mr. Cronenberg does seem to be a director-writer of some style. But like I said before, it is a cult hit and should be viewed as an odd masterpiece that was once, original and shocking.