"Death to Videodrome! Long live the new flesh!" It was a pleasure revisiting Videodrome, truly one of my all time favorite horror films and a must see for Bad Movie Knights. I'm not much of a fan of James Woods, but he fits the part of Max Renn to a T. All of his oily smarminess, which I normally loathe, actually works in this film. And this film was fairly prescient in lieu of the fact that it predates the internet. Today, with a bit of downloading, we have just about anything available for view, good and bad. Back in 1983, not so much. Max runs a cable TV network and he's in search of hard core pornography, the harder the better. Or is he in search of something more?

He's got a technician working overtime to pick up anything he can from the ether with his gigantic satellite dish. Gotta love the eighties. A modest satellite at the time was about the size of your house. It appears that his video tech Harlan, played beautifully by Peter Dvorsky, has picked up some scattered hard-core bondage feed from an unknown source, probably from outside the country. There's not much of it and it's badly distorted as a result of scrambling, but it's enough to hook Max. He's gotta have more, more, more! Say, viewing that kind of stuff could start to affect you after a while, don't you think? Let's watch.

Things get more interesting quickly as Nicki Brand, played by Deborah Harry, enters the scene. You've gotta love the character names and they only get better. They meet on a television program discussing the problem of violence and sex in the media. Max plays the pro side of things and our other guests play the ... well they all seem to be taking the pro side. Nicki is a radio psychologist and our third guest, Brian O'Blivion (I told you they get better) is simply a television image. He refuses to appear live. The debate never really gets going as Max and Nicki are practically crawling all over each other. Get a room!

They do, back at Max's swinging bachelor pad. This place is special and he's got porn all over. No problem for Nicki, she's into it. She's actually into a lot of things; cutting, beating, burning. She's serious whack. And then she finds a copy of Videodrome and pops it in the Beta. Beta! Perfect! Harlan's been working hard on debugging the video and he's also discovered that it doesn't film in some far off place, it shoots right in Pittsburgh. All sounds good except for the fact that those who star in the film never make a reappearance in further episodes. Nicki doesn't care, she wants an audition.

I won't ruin the movie for you. Figuring out what is real and what is fantasy is part of the fun of this film. Things get distorted early and often and as such can become fairly disturbing at times. The myth of snuff films was alive and well in '83, but it's more disturbing in retrospect with images of Daniel Pearl fresh in our collective consciousness.

On a side note, I highly recommend the Criterion Collection version of this film. I always recommend the Criterion Collection for any film as they kick ass. The extras for Videodrome are outstanding. They include the porn clips that Cronenberg filmed especially for this film and a lengthy interview with three of the masters of horror at the time, John Landis, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg. They are discussing their particular views on the making of horror films, but the thing that cracks me up is that Carpenter clearly doesn't fit in with the other two and comes off as an uptight schmuck. He's sitting between Landis and Cronenberg who eventually just ignore him and carry on with the conversation on their own. Priceless!

Hamlin Grade :7

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