The film begins with a video wakeup message for Woods and it seems like it's being broadcast on the TV station he owns / runs. Or, it's a pre-recorded videotape. That we don't know for sure exactly is a sly nod to all the hijinks that follow.
Woods plays a character named Max Renn whose station — Civic TV, cable channel 83 — is as sleazy as it gets. He's in the business of airing actual pornography over the air, and he's always on the lookout for the weirdest stuff out there, like Samurai Dreams, a nice little motion picture where we see a wooden dildo dressed up like a little geisha woman. Awww.
When he's not buying black market Asian tapes out of sleazy hotel rooms, Max is working with his righthand man, Harlan, in the satellite control room of Civiv TV, attempting to pick up signals from around the world and essentially steal pornographic content to air on Channel 83. This guy Harlan, played by Peter Dvorsky, follows in the line of notable eccentric side characters that Cronenberg writes so well, very much like Robert Silverman's roles in the The Brood and Scanners.
They discover a truly fucked up torture video that might be coming from Malaysia. This is called Videodrome. And Max is intrigued.
Then Max goes on a talkshow to blast some cigs and discuss morality — or lack thereof — both on his TV channel and in society at large. Here we're introduced to a couple more important characters. Debbie Harry, lead singer of Blondie, here in obe of her first real film roles, plays a kinda self-help radio host. Cronenberg's already toying with some of the major themes here: sex, over-stimulation, and desensitization to increasingly violent and debased content. We're also introduced to this man on TV, the goofy and strange, Professor Brian O'Blivion (not his real name).
Back in the satellite room, Harlan reveals to Max that the signal isn't coming from the far east, but rather Pittsburgh.
Later that night, Max brings Debbie Harry back for a nice, wholesome Netflix and chill session. No, just kidding, they put on Videodrome, and to Max's surprise Debbie Harry is really into. It turns out she's heavy into S&M and has the wounds to prove it. So she proceeds to get Max to pierce her ears (?) and then they have sex.
The next day Max meets with an older lady, a producer of erotic films and she's peddling her latest wears. But Max is no longer interested in traditional porn after Videodrome, and he quizzes this wily veteran about it. That "better on TV than on the streets" is an important quote, as we'll come to find out; the line between reality and the content we consume is about to get more and more blurred.
Back at his apartment, Debbie Harry tells Max that she's going away, "on assignment." Max is not too pleased to find she's going to Pittsburgh to try to get on Videodrome, and they get into a little quarrel about it, which ends with Debbie Harry putting a cigarette out on her tit... naturally.
Max meets the porno lady for lunch and she gives him a scoop on Videodrome. I briefly thought this was heading into 8mm territory, but thankfully it does not go down into the dregs of snuff film hell. He agrees to air her most recent erotic film if she'll give him a name of someone involved with Videodrome
Brian O'Blivion is in charge of a homeless shelter / possible religious cult that goes by the excellent name of "Cathode Ray Mission." Max goes there and finds a bunch of homeless people glued to TV sets in little makeshift booths. Think of it like a soup kitchen only instead of soup you're getting basic cable.
Max finds Brian O'Blivion's daughter Bianca in the stairwell of the mission and they go into this rather swanky office for what is essentially a homeless shelter, and she explains what exactly it is going on with all those creepy old men watching TVs downstairs. Max wants to meet the good Professor Brian O'Blivion but his daughter explains that he only communicates via pre-recorded videotape messages. OKKKKK.
Back at the pad, Max ponders all the information he's learned thus far, and gets a gun out of storage, before being interrupted by a knock at the door. This is the first taste we get of potential hallucinations and/or that aforementioned bridging of the gap between reality and what's on the screen. Max slaps her for taking Videodrome out of the VHS player and she briefly becomes Debbie Harry. What the hell is going on? Maybe he has a rash or something?
The tape his assistant has dropped off is none other than a message from Brian O'Blivion, and this isn't your average VHS tape. Here we get our first real glimpse at the genius of Rick Baker. It's such a subtle moment — that tape seeming to breath — but it's so effective, especially as a taste for what's to come. So Max sits back to relax and see what this guy has to say.
So yeah, it's a lot to process. But I found it to be confusing in the most delightful way. There's a good kind of confusion and a bad kind of confusion and the state of mind that this living TV set helps render is most definitely the good kind. What your witnessing here is of course the first of several bonafide iconic moments in filmmaking special effects. Just amazing.
Max returns to the Cathode Ray Mission to confront Bianca O'Blivion about that, uh, unusual videotape. She lays down a lot of exposition here — but it never gets too over analytical or bogged down. As I mentioned earlier, much of the success here is due to the strength of Woods in the lead role. Cronenberg simply hasn't worked with an actor of this quality until now. She comes clean about Videodrome, that it causes tumors that create hallucinations. And her father was "just another victim" who actually died months ago; all that's left is just the tapes he recorded, 1,000s of them. You see Brian O'Blivion helped create Videodrome but his partners turned on him when he realized what they were planning to use it for.
Bianca gives Max some tapes of her dad for him to "learn" and he does what anyone would do: watches them alone, shirtless, with a gun holster strapped to his body. All the while, Max is scratching this rash on his stomach with his gun, which doesn't seem like the safest idea but when you consider that the movie has almost fully transitioned into post-reality mode, sure go ahead! scratch that itch with your gun, bro! Shit, maybe even stick the gun inside yourself when that rash mutates and opens up? I mean... Did you think the horror was going to be all analog machines and not involve the human body? Oh, how adorable. Nope. James Woods sticks a gun inside himself and the skin closes behind the hole. There's a lot of fascinating undercurrents that this sequence sets off. I see it as the visualization of the chicken and the egg, or the ouroboros, of mankind's connection to violence. The cyclical nature of that relationship and how its intrinsically built in. But... What the hell do I know?
Max is then picked up by some strange guy and we're introduced to the head of Spectacular Optical, the very on-the-nose named character, Barry Convex. He tells Max that he wasn't meant to pick up on the signal and that Videodrome could be a "giant hallucination machine and much more." Whatever that means. He goes to meet him at his LensCrafters franchise face-to-face.
Barry Convex explains they use torture because it opens up the sensitive areas of the viewer's brain to better let the Videodrome signal inside. Then he invites Max to try on this giant headgear that will record his hallucinations and naturally Max, forever the risk taker, agrees. The ensuing scene looks incredibly cool, but pragmatically its one of the weaker threads in the film, as we never see nor hear about this device again. However, I do think that this is the delineation point between the audience having any true handle on what's real and what isn't. Plus, David Cronenberg basically invented the Oculus Rift here, and that's something.
After some intense-ass hallucinating wherein he found himself inside the original orangey red torture room whipping both Debbie Harry and the older porn producer lady, Max finds himself back in the control room with Harlan who reveals that he's been working for Convex this entire time! They explain that Max was chosen for this, that there was never any "pirate satellite feed." Harlan had been playing him pre-recorded tapes whilst never looking at the screen himself so as not to be afflicted with the Videodrome disease. MAX is naturally upset by all this, his whole relationship with this guy having been a con. So they go back and forth, filling in some gaps of the story but — for the 19th time — it's never over-explained, it feels like the exact right amount of explaining. Especially because everything is going to fracture a few more times before we get to the conclusion. Like right now, when Barry decides to ramp up the experiment.
You didn't think they were going to use that excellent torso mouth effect only one time? This was the first film where all the rapid-fire exposition doesn't muddy the waters. The waters are still muddy, very muddy. But that's a feature, not a bug. These are abstract ideas and they benefit from being conveyed through surreal abstraction. Why would Convex LITERALLY shove a VHS tape into Max's stomach? Blending reality with delusions might seem like a cheap idea to show off freaky shit, but it really isn't when that's part of the underlying theme. My ultimate response to this — and I'm not trying to sound trite — is, who cares? James Woods is about to grow a gun hand. A GUN HAND, I says...
As this is happening, Max starts hearing the voice of Convex inside his head. And he's got a very ominous directive for our pal here: "kill your partners, give us Channel 83."
And so that's exactly what he does. Max is now a fully brainwashed and weaponized (literally) assassin, thanks to Videodrome. The evil genius / LensCrafter franchisor Barry Convex has won. The "tech" works. We need not worry about how or why it works because James Woods is running around with a gun for a hand and a stomach that eats VHS tapes.
It is crazy to think that this is somehow both the most bizarre thing Chronenburg's made, yet also features the most flushed out and interesting characters by a mile. This cuts to the heart of why the film works so well. The batshit ideas have been harnessed and controlled, anchored by great performances and improved writing. So after killing his partners, the voice in his head tells him to kill Bianca O'Blivion, and he busts into Cathode Ray Mission to do just that. But she knew this day was coming, and she has a plan.
Bianca gets Max to hook into a new Videodrome signal, one that she's honed. "Death to Videodrome. Long live the new flesh" becomes the mantra for the remainder of this final act. And Max goes to the Spectacular Optical where he runs into his old friend Harlan who — unaware he's no longer under the Convex mind control — gives up some useful information. He attempts to insert a now fleshy VHS tape into Max's tum-tum slit, only nope, haha, not this time, Max has other ideas! Like sucking Harlan's hand inside himself and turning it into a bloody stump with what looks like a grenade at the end of it? Just phenomenal stuff. Oh, and RIP Harlan.
Max finds his way to the eyewear trade show Harlan mentioned (the Medici line — named after "The Eye is the Window of the Soul Guy" — very clever). There's a hilarious song and dance routine before Barry Convex makes his way on stage only to be promptly assassinated by Max and his gun hand. As it turns out — from what might be the most spectacular Rick Baker effects in the whole damn movie — Convex was made up of 99% Videodrome tumor this whole time. And it's that just the nastiest, most amazing thing you've ever seen. There's no CGI in a million years that could ever rival it. Anyway, everyone freaks out and leaves the building in a panic and Max is able to flee pretty much undetected, which, well that's neither here nor there.
Thus begins one of the stranger denouements you're ever gonna come across. An emotionless Max breaks into a harbor area (?) and finds a derelict's living quarter. He sees Debbie Harry on a TV and she tells him that the next step is to kill himself and he does that ON THE TV as he watches THE TV and then the TV explodes with gruesome human organs. THEN he does that IRL and the film cuts to black with the sound of a gunshot.
But what is IRL? In a world saturated by digital information, media, content, we are what we consume: it's one and the same. This film leaned into the metaphor and seemed far less concerned with sensible practicality. Previous entries in the canon seemed to ask, is this a world that could exist? Even as insane and outrageous as they got at times, they always felt tied to some semblance of rational explanation, indebted to the solution or the possibility of one. And that — to me — always felt like a disservice to the thematic elements. But having Jimmy Wood turn into a human VCR assassin, a literal mutant who seems to exist in between a world of hallucination and reality, well, there's really no way of viable scientific way to unpack that. And that is spectacularly freeing for an audience. They don't need to get bogged down with the Xs & Os of it all; they can simply gawk at all that glorious Rick Baker effect work and let the movie wash over them. And maybe pick apart the metaphorical elements later, or maybe not. As Cronenberg himself said, it's just entertainment.
This was easily his best movie to date. I'll give it a very high 9 as a hedge, with the caveat that I might bump it up to a 10 after I can view it in the context of the rest of his filmography.
𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚒𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 8th 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝙲𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚗𝚋𝚞𝚛𝚐 – 𝚖𝚢 𝚌𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚕 𝚠𝚊𝚝𝚌𝚑/𝚛𝚎𝚠𝚊𝚝𝚌𝚑 𝚘𝚏 𝙳𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚍 𝙲𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚗𝚋𝚎𝚛𝚐'𝚜 𝚏𝚒𝚕𝚖𝚘𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚙𝚑𝚢. 𝙲𝚕𝚒𝚌𝚔 𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚏𝚞𝚕𝚕 𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚎...
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 427D - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 429 ⫸
⫷ EPISODE 427D - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 429 ⫸
Videodrome is a 1983 Canadian science fiction body horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring James Woods, Sonja Smits, and Debbie Harry. Set in Toronto during the early 1980s, it follows the CEO of a small UHF television station who stumbles upon a broadcast signal of snuff films. The layers of deception and mind-control conspiracy unfold as he uncovers the signal's source, and loses touch with reality in a series of increasingly bizarre hallucinations. It was released on February 4, 1983.
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