Videodrome (1983) – Review

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t stay around to watch. I just can’t cope with the freaky stuff.”
These word utter from the lips of Barry Convex, the face of the Spectacular Optical Corporation around about the halfway point of David Cronenberg’s seminal Videodrome – and you have to admit, Bazza’s got something of a point. You see sitting in the middle of Cronenberg early, horror period is a movie that arguably sees the Canadian King of Venereal Horror at the peak of his genre powers, orchestrating literally mind-blowing conspiracy of S&M hallucinations, techno-body horror and a stark warning about our use of television and other such stimulating gadgets. Ferociously original and deliberately inpenetrable, The Fly might have seen horror-era Cronenberg at his most touching, but Videodrome is surely him at his most cruel as he knocks you silly with some top-notch Rick Baker effects while he chokes you unconscious with a plot that’s deliberately too deranged to follow with only a single viewing. It’s time to tune in to Videodrome – don’t sit too close to the screen now, for obvious reasons…

Max Renn is the magnificently sleazy president of CIVIC-TV, a low-rent television station that deals in unrepentantly sensationalist programmes that often include gratuitous amounts of sex and violence. However, it’s not enough for Max who wants to guarantee viewership by pushing the boundaries of taste and taboo wherever he can. On his search for the next big thrill, he stumbles upon a pirate show named – you guessed it – Videodrome that seemingly is nothing more than two masked men torturing people in front of a plain clay wall and Max believes this sordid little production is exactly what he’s been looking for.
While some of his contacts warn him off from trying to aquire the rights to Videodrome, Max forges ahead, but as he does, strange occurrences and people start to enter his disreputable world. The first is radio show host Nicki Brand, who reveals to Max while they’re dating that she has a fairly strong sadomasochistic streak and would just love to be a contestant on Videodrome. Elsewhere, Renn finds that his search for the exclusive titular show has placed him in the middle of socio-political war for the minds of North America  that’s being waged between reclusive media theorist Brian O’Blivion and businessman Barry Convex (you’ve got to love those names).
But how would a simple show about torture and murder allow someone to manipulate the minds of its viewers? Simple, because viewing Videodrome causes the watcher to suffer bizarre, sexually charged hallucinations that ultimately lead to them highly susceptible to being reprogrammed at will by anyone who wields the broadcast. Stuck in the middle of this scenario and tripping some freakish balls, can Max save himself from becoming a puppet of whomever wants to win the most?

Even by Cronenbergian standards, Videodrome is a fucking weird film, but then, when you’re the accumulation of a filmography that thus far included an attack of phallic worms that cause sex mania, a strain of human rabies caused by a vagina-like opening in a woman’s armpit and a swarm of murderous mutant children born from exterior wombs powered by the id, weird is the only way to go, I guess.
However, there’s a real sense that Cronenberg had really got to a place where he could deploy his particular brand of social commentary in a way that felt far more controlled than he ever had before. Videodrome drops its shocks in are far more mature fashion than his scrappier earlier works and as a result, the movie still stands as one of the most disturbingly timely horror films ever made. Through a plot that’s deliberately inaccessible by design and some of the most disturbingly awesome visions seen at the time, Cronenberg hammers home the dangers of obsessive media consumption and what it does to the human psyche and once you’ve watched a loved one’s personality pull a sharp 180 after a bout of doom scrolling on social media, you’ll admit that the Canuck of carnage has something of a tumor-sized point. But even beyond that, Videodrome can be a metaphor for so much more as both Max and Nicki are perfect avatars for the dangers of pushing things such as personal desires way too far even if there wasn’t entrails exploding out of TV sets to shake you out of your stupor.

If Cronenberg is at the top of his game here, cold and aloof as ever while matters boil out of control like a squirming mound of brain tissue, then he’s ably matched by a never better James Woods as he channels every iota of charming douchebag in his body to bring us one of Cronenberg’s most fascinating anti-heroes. In fact you feel that with anyone else in the role, you’d question whether anyone would actually be fucked up enough to actually put a snuff TV show on American television – but Woods sells it disturbingly well. Also impressing is Blondie front woman Debbie Harry as the tragic, self-harming Nicki who can’t control her destructive sexual urges for five minutes without burning herself with a cigarette.
However, the other main member of Videodrome’s crew who deserves a rapacious shout-out is very special special effects man Rick Baker whose pulsing and upsettingly sensual works still impress today. Be it an undulating television set that Max’s face sinks into while he makes out with it, to a literal biomechanical handgun/gun-hand” that fires bullets that cause tumors to erupt from the wounds. However, among its many, brain searing sights, surely the sight of the villains controlling Max by inserting a fleshy, pulsing video cassette into a vaginal opening in Max’s stomach takes the body horror cake.

However, I have to say that my favourite thing about Videodrome is that even after all these years, I still have no idea what actually happens at the end. Is Max still sitting in Barry Convex’s lab with that hallucination recording device on his head? Is everything occuring as Max sees it as he slowly transitions into a whole new form of life? Or is he running around town, utterly brainwashed, destined to end his own life with a self-inflicted bullet at the end of the film. Who the fuck knows – I sure don’t – but then, knowing isn’t the point of Videodrome as it plunges you into a reality as unstable as a stanchion bridge made of pasta. It’s all stimulation and misinformation and weirdness, baby and it’s so unnerving that something so overtly strange can somehow feel horribly so familiar.
Long live the New Flesh indeed.

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