Videodrome (1983)

Say, do you ever get the hankering to watch movies about the neurological effects of mysterious Cathode Ray Tubes, TV's getting whipped to orgasm, and cancer guns made out of hands? If so, then you're my kind of person, and David Cronenberg's! Today I'll be looking at his 1983 film Videodrome!...

Max Renn, the president of a sleazy underground porno channel, is looking for new, more extreme material, to draw in more viewers. He comes across a show called Videodrome, which consist of nothing more than extreme sadism inflicted upon restrained victims. Believing the show to be staged, Renn is intrigued, and is interested in showing Videodrome on his channel. He soon finds out that Videodrome was originally created by the reclusive Brian O'Blivion, and that its far more than what it seems at face value.

As Max uncovers more about Videodrome, he starts to develop hallucinations, and his grip on reality either starts to falter, or is made more clearer than it ever has been before...

Videodrome is an extremely surreal movie. If you can label it as anything, I suppose you'd call it a sci-fi/horror, but it doesn't have as much of either to be considered one of either genre all that much.Could you label Videodrome comfortably into a genre? Maybe? I don't know.

This movie follows a well-written plot that is an extremely intriguing sit. Videodrome's themes and concepts comes across very well, complementing the movie perfectly. The film is heavily tied to TV, and its place in society-What it represents, and what it does to us. As for its surreal factor, some say that it's postmodernist, which means something. The whole film weaves in and out of hallucinations, and there are times when you don't know if what you're seeing is really happening or not.

Part of what works about Videodrome's bizarre imagery is that in a way (or should I say 'ways') you know what's causing it, so it's not just made up of a string of random surreal scenes just for pretentiousness' sake. This makes the film's pacing much better than it would have been if it was just meaningless bull.

This movie's effects are great We get a whole slew of awesome practical effects courtesy of Rick Baker, and while they do look a bit latex-y at times, and the skinned fist looks hilariously fake given its shape, they make an already great film better!

The acting in Videodrome is very good! James Woods is intense as a man losing his grip on reality, while Deborah Harry is decent as the sadomasochistic Nicki Brand (only decent since she's not in the movie all that much), and Leslie Carlson makes for a pretty good villain, though I would have preferred he do a bit more.

The score here is very effective, helping the film feel grim and foreboding.

I  have very few complaints with Videodrome. The first is that Debbie Harry's character disappears from the film too soon (she comes back, but only for a couple of trippy hallucination sequences). The other is that we don't really know much of why the villainous Barry Convex and co. want to use Videodrome, nor do they do enough.

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Say, do you ever get the hankering to watch movies about the neurological effects of the Cathode Ray Tube, TV's getting whipped to orgasm, and cancer guns made out of hands? If so, then you're my kind of person, and David Cronenberg's! Today I'll be looking at his 1983 film Videodrome!...

Videodrome is a fantastically bizarre film that I highly recommend. It examines the nature of Television in a way that'll either make you scratch your head, or sit in excitement at the film's dark, thought-provoking plot...