Videodrome (1983)

This is still an engaging movie for being made 25 years ago. Max Renn “James Wood“ is on that never ending quest for cutting edge programming to include on his TV station. And this activity is where it all starts to unravel for Max. Erotically appealing as things are after he watches ‘Videodrome’ he begins to come undone.

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Videodrome (1983)

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The Directing by David Cronenberg and the facts of the TV signal soon become horrific and deadly. The sexual and drug using side of his girl friend, a passion-addiction from the 80s add to Nicki Brand’s “Deborah Harry“ slide into prophet Brian O’Blivion’s overall game plan for her and eventually mankind. The combination of exoticism and violence are now beginning to surface in Chronenberg’s mythology. This same “exoticism and violence” are to be explored even further in his upcoming features, “Scanners” and “eXistenZ”. As Max begins to loose control his TV set seems to come alive and his stomach begins to look like a female vagina, where a strange looking gun is found. It’s pretty trippy fare that Chronenberg brings to the screen here. As the movie plays out, we fear for the life of Max just as we did for Nikki.

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The suspense is captivating and it all works in some quazi-science fiction glimpse of the fears that free thinking persons had in the 1980s about the cutting age technology of the era and especially Video, same as we do today with the Internet, and many unknown technologies that haven’t even hit today’s consumer level. In many way that is total and complete horror- the horror of the unknown. The movie is terse paced at 88:00 minutes. It remains simply provocative and strangely contemporary for an 1988 movie. After additional viewings you almost fell the fears. Highly recommended.

Horror News

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Videodrome (1983)

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Released in 1983, David Cronenberg's Videodrome now seems, with hindsight, one of his best and most prophetic films. A small-time cable channel programmer, Max Renn (James Woods) is a kind of sleaze merchant who plays porn on the airwaves. He's on the lookout for the next big thing, and he thinks he finds it in a program called "Videodrome," that features realistic whipping and torture. It turns out that the show doesn't exist and the tape that Max watched actually sends out a signal that causes brain tumors and hallucinations.

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A woman he's just begun dating, a radio talk show host named Nicki (Deborah Harry), features prominently in his visions. Of course, once we find out about the hallucinations, we can't believe anything that we see. But the evil company that developed the program now has Max in its control. By inserting tapes into a slot in his stomach, they can control him and get him to assassinate certain competitors.

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Videodrome depends heavily on its creepy visual effects to effectively transport us into its world. Artisan Rick Baker did a miraculous job on the pulsating tapes, the hole in Max's stomach, etc. Some of these effects may have dated a bit, but I far prefer the actual reality of latex and rubber to the cold, distant nature of computer graphics. True to Cronenberg's obsession with relationships between machinery and flesh, the director captures the worst-case scenario of what might happen at the dawn of the video era, going all the way back to our parents' warning us not to sit too close to the television.

In 2010, Criterion released Videodrome on a Blu-Ray.

Combustible Celluloid

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Videodrome (1983)

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