"I live in a highly excited state of overstimulation." (Videodrome (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Videodrome (DVD)
Date:	16/07/09 (102 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good 80s special effects, intriguing plot

Disadvantages: Some wooden acting; a bit difficult to know if it's meant to be funny or not

A review of the Universal DVD, currently going for less than a fiver on amazon.

Made in 1983, this is one of David Cronenberg's best films. The Canadian director was the weirdest and most personal of the 70s horror directors (unless you count David Lynch), and his early films are full of weird sexuality treated in an almost clinical way; understated acting; and pulsating body modification. Videodrome is the last of his early films; shortly afterwards he was making Stephen King adaptations and big budget special effects movies. He wasn't this interesting again until Crash (the car-crash-sex one, not the racism-is-bad one).

A guy called Max Renn co-owns a small gore-and-porn TV station somewhere in America. He's always on the lookout for the next big thing in porn, and is drawn to harder and harder stuff. And then he stumbles across a pirate satellite station showing an incredibly real torture and snuff show called Videodrome. He attempts to find out who's behind it, but Videodrome is having some weird effects on his body and his mind.

This is a fascinating glimpse into a world in which satellite TV and video tape were cutting edge technology. New forms of technology have always inspired horror stories, from Grand Guignol plays about men listening in horror as their wives are murdered at the other end of a phone line, to modern Internet horror like Untraceable. It's of its time - there are some hilarious retro TV idents, and huge, clunky looking VCRs. There's something quaint about a film in which old TVs are supposed to inspire unease - this is a film that would make a lot more sense in the internet/computer game age (and Cronenberg effectively remade it as a computer game film, eXistenZ, in 1999). Still, old VHS tapes at least look a bit more interesting than DVDs, especially when they're throbbing weirdly. I also love the grimy 80s ambience, especially the scene of the porn executives calmly watching their latest acquisition ("Oriental sex is a natural.")

Max is played by James Woods, who's always a bit unsettling. Max is a sleazebag, a cynical porn peddler; we're not really meant to like him. His performance is a bit too deadpan for its own good. You can't do deadpan incredulity, although he tries. I know for a fact that if *Id* just lost my gun inside the large vaginal aperture that had appeared on *my* abdomen, I'd be a lot more freaked out about it! Strangely, as the film goes on, Woods starts to resemble Cronenberg himself more and more. I wonder if that was intentional.

Most of the rest of the cast are a little bit wooden in the way Cronenberg's casts often are in this era. The only other famous cast member is Debbie Harry out of Blondie. As a teenager, this is the film I always thought of as 'the one where you see Debbie Harry's nipples and then she stubs cigarettes out on her own boobs'. She plays Max's masochistic girlfriend, in a role that could be more interesting if she was a better actress. Their S&M affair is treated, in usual Cronenberg fashion, with all the passion of bacteria being examined under a microscope.

The special effects are good for their time (Rick Baker, who did American Werewolf in London, was responsible). There are one or two very gruesome deaths (more than enough to earn the film an 18 rating even without the S&M scenes) and some deeply weird throbbing TVs, organic looking guns and, er, vaginal apertures. They're all just about effective, more so than the bigger budget scenes Cronenberg put in at the end of The Fly a few years later. The brief bits of Videodrome (the show) that we see are filmed in a very amateurish way, a common enough trick to make something look real. But they're bland compared to similar scenes in the notorious low-budget grot-flick Emanuelle in America, which allegedly inspired this.

I can't really tell how seriously we're meant to take the story. Cronenberg's films always seem to skate on the edge of absurdity (his character names are often ludicrous; Videodrome includes characters called Brian O'Blivion and Barry Convex). It's played straight but is often very silly, and I can't believe it isn't intentional, at least sometimes (the dance routine in the trade show is obviously meant to be funny, but the image of a man burying his face in a pulsating, breast-like TV set is surely meant to raise a smile. Surely!) eXistenZ covers the same ground but is played far more blatantly for laughs. I can't really tell if I'm meant to find Videodrome funny or not. I do, kind of.

It isn't scary, and it never quite manages to be disturbing, perhaps because all the actors are too calm, perhaps because it's obvious that nothing is at stake. The whole idea of video and rogue TV stations threatening society is very probably a parody of the arguments thrown around by censors at the time (this was made at the start of the video nasty scare in the UK). But you can never be sure with Cronenberg, a thoroughly inscrutable director.

It's directed pretty well, with the clutter and squalor of Max's world nicely conveyed. It mostly has that muted urban look that was so popular back then, but gets a bit more colourful in some of the hallucination scenes. Max starts hallucinating pretty early on, and you very quickly realise that pretty much everything we see could just be happening is his head (an idea later nicked for American Psycho - I suspect Bret Easton Ellis must have seen this. Cronenberg was attached to the film version of American Psycho at one point.) But obviously a film in which we can't trust anything we see is difficult to engage with, and sometimes feels more like an intellectual exercise than a horror movie.

It gets away with it. The horror scenes are visceral enough and weird enough to keep the gorehounds interested. It's a bit pretentious. There's a lot of nonsense philosophy spouted ("the television is the retina of the mind's eye") but it's probably not meant to be taken completely seriously. You can kind of enjoy it as an odd conspiracy thriller with gore scenes and weird hallucinations. It kind of works on that level, and kind of works on a more unusual, experimental level.

The DVD has good picture quality. The only extra is a trailer, which is amazing, featuring animation and a very early-80s song that isn't in the film. The Universal logo when you insert the disk boasts that it's celebrating 20 years of ET, which is pretty funny. Videodrome is about as far as you can get from ET. The cast and credits section on the back of the DVD box has obviously been copied from an old poster without anyone checking it, as it advises us to 'Read the Zebra Book', a book-of-the-film that's been out of print for decades.

It's not perfect, but I don't think Cronenberg does perfect. It's very enjoyable; it's a fabulous look at weird 80s techno paranoia; it continues the director's exploration of weird sex and physical mutation; and you get to see Debbie Harry's tits. It gets my vote!

Summary: A strange and puzzling horror film