Videodrome (1983)
Directed by David Cronenberg
As the president of a trashy TV channel, Max Renn is desperate for new programming to attract viewers. When he happens upon "Videodrome," a TV show dedicated to gratuitous torture and punishment, Max sees a potential hit and broadcasts the show on his channel. However, after his girlfriend auditions for the show and never returns, Max investigates the truth behind Videodrome and discovers that the graphic violence may not be as fake as he thought.
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What critics say influenced Videodrome
From the venereal disease that infects the Skyline Towers of Shivers to the strange gifts bestowed upon the protagonists of Scanners and The Dead Zone and the dysfunctional sexual fetishes of the cultists in Crash , Cronenberg's films are about breaches of normalcy, the influences that keep us from going about our lives the way we might choose to.
You can trace David Cronenberg’s meditations on technology, disease, addiction, and mutation in the body human all the way back to his earliest shorts (Stereo and Crimes of the Future) and features (Shivers and Rabid).
David Cronenberg ("Shivers"/Dead Zone"/Rabid") slickly helms this virtual reality sci-fi horror story that veers from being risible to sinister as it explores how viewers are brainwashed by TV, obsessed with technology and exploited by perverse sex.
These days he's still kicking much ass on films like Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, but the Canadian-born David Cronenberg started his career with one hell of a genre streak: Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Dead Zone (1983), The Fly (1986), and Dead Ringers (1988).
Cronenberg’s ideas of bypassing evolution through science and technology are also expressed in his later works, especially Rabid (1976), Videodrome (1982) and eXistenZ (1999).
Canadian David Cronenberg's ("Rabid"/"The Brood"/"Videodrome") first venture as a director of commercial feature films is an intoxicatingly graphic sexy, bloody and violent horror film that is more luridly entertaining than meaningful.
You can trace David Cronenberg’s meditations on technology, disease, addiction, and mutation in the body human all the way back to his earliest shorts (Stereo and Crimes of the Future) and features (Shivers and Rabid).
You can trace David Cronenberg’s meditations on technology, disease, addiction, and mutation in the body human all the way back to his earliest shorts (Stereo and Crimes of the Future) and features (Shivers and Rabid).
These days he's still kicking much ass on films like Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, but the Canadian-born David Cronenberg started his career with one hell of a genre streak: Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Dead Zone (1983), The Fly (1986), and Dead Ringers (1988).
You can trace David Cronenberg’s meditations on technology, disease, addiction, and mutation in the body human all the way back to his earliest shorts (Stereo and Crimes of the Future) and features (Shivers and Rabid).
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Not that his earlier films had been negligible (after all, Scanners (1981) gave the world the exploding head), but this was something moreand his last work that straddled the line between exploitation and mainstream (even if his mainstream works arent all that mainstream).
From the venereal disease that infects the Skyline Towers of Shivers to the strange gifts bestowed upon the protagonists of Scanners and The Dead Zone and the dysfunctional sexual fetishes of the cultists in Crash , Cronenberg's films are about breaches of normalcy, the influences that keep us from going about our lives the way we might choose to.
These days he's still kicking much ass on films like Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, but the Canadian-born David Cronenberg started his career with one hell of a genre streak: Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Dead Zone (1983), The Fly (1986), and Dead Ringers (1988).
His previous film, Scanners, had become a minor hit and a cult film, but it was a pretty straightforward approach to the idea of telepathy as a product of genetic experimentation, with a fairly conventional conspiracy thriller plot.
Videodrome (83) would establish Cronenberg’s ability to evoke superbly textured performances, but Lack’s blank affect is characteristic of an entire subclass of productively awkward acting throughout his oeuvre.
The limelight reflects so harshly on a misbegotten new shocker called "Videodrome" that it could damage the career of writer-director David Cronenberg, hitherto a promising young specialist in the macabre whose cult reputation expanded to the outskirts of the mainstream two winters back with "Scanners."
Never coherent and frequently pretentious, the film remains an audacious attempt to place obsessive personal images before a popular audience--a kind of Kenneth Anger version of Star Wars.