Review of Videodrome (1983) by Ben U — 24 Dec 2008

Oh David Cronenberg why don't you make movies like this anymore? I mean seriously...

From the opening thrum hum of Howard Shore's score over the Universal logo; an ominous, submissive noise, I knew I was in for a treat.

Something so entertaining, so intellectually stimulating as this... just awesomeness.

James Woods' infamous neurotic and obsessive manners match up perfectly here as he plays Max Renn, programmer and co-owner of Civic TV, a small radical TV station. He's out to acquire as much enticing subterranean programming as possible, and then he stumbles upon a little program where there's a lot of torture and death and Deborah Harry gets turned on by it... And things turn very weird. Perceptions, hallucinations. Realities, how we see them. The framing of it all. Through a lens, on a screen.

Cronenberg likes Kaufka and K. Dick I'm sure, but he proves he's a man of his own beat here. Though the format is dead, the commentaries playing out on the use of media and technology, sex and violence - TV is the new god/enlightenment vs. control through subliminal message - are far more relevant now, because, well, we've made the movie's nightmares pretty much true... in some sense. We're wired. We all have new names in the digital reality. New personas in new flesh. Those little blue tooth friends you see people with... very much like the gun that becomes a grotesque extension of Woods' hand, no?