Director – David Cronenberg – 1983 – Canada – Cert. 18 – 87m
*****
This review originally appeared in What’s On In London during the film’s revival at the ICA. See also my review for London Calling Internet.
In a career-defining performance from 1983, the young James Woods is Max Renn, glutted on the diet of video porn he watches as buyer for a Cable TV station. Everything he sees is “too soft”. “I’m looking for something tough,” he proclaims, “something to break through the market.”
In the station’s basement, his technician assistant Harlan (Peter Dvorsky) finds the very thing. Videodrome. Women strung up and beaten to death. No cuts. One locked off camera. Nil production values. Here, indeed, is something tough.
Welcome to a world of media personalities like Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley), a man who no longer exists as flesh but merely as viewable video images. Like Nikki Brand (Debbie Harry), who agrees with Renn on a TV chat show slot that her red dress is a come on, later vanishing after declaring she should audition for the Videodrome show.
A world where hands mutate into guns, men literally bury their heads in eroticised television screens and one person loads a videocassette into another’s stomach to programme him. A world where suddenly the person you think is standing in front of you is in fact someone completely different. “I had a tumour removed,” says O’Blivion, “and it was Videodrome.” Long Live the New Flesh.
Then ascendant horror writer-director David Cronenberg (Crash) has since been embraced by mainstream cinema, but this prophetic and blackly comic slice of SF sleaze remains his masterpiece. Pertinent as ever in these days of the internet and computer viruses, it has lost none of its power to shock in the intervening years.
This review originally appeared in What’s On In London during the film’s revival at the ICA. See also my review for London Calling Internet.
Trailer (1983:
Trailer (2020):