Amazon.com Essentials:
Love it or loathe it, David Cronenberg's 1983 horror film
Videodrome is a movie to be reckoned with. Inviting extremes of
response from disdain (critic Roger Ebert called it "one of the least
entertaining films ever made") to academic euphoria, it's the kind of
film that is simultaneously sickening and seemingly devoid of
humanity, but also blessed with provocative ideas and a compelling
subtext of social commentary. Giving yet another powerful and
disturbing performance, James Woods stars as the operator of a
low-budget cable-TV station who accidentally intercepts a mysterious
cable transmission that features the apparent torture and death of
women in its programming. He traces the show to its source and
discovers a mysterious plot to broadcast a subliminally influential
signal into the homes of millions, masterminded by a quasi-religious
character named Brian O'Blivion and his overly reverent
daughter. Meanwhile Woods is falling under the spell, becoming a
victim of video, and losing his grip--both physically and
psychologically--on the distinction between reality and television. A
potent treatise on the effects of total immersion into our mass-media
culture, Videodrome is also (to the delight of Cronenberg's
loyal fans) a showcase for obsessions manifested in the tangible world
of the flesh. It's a hallucinogenic world in which a television set
seems to breath with a life of its own, and where the body itself can
become a VCR repository for disturbing imagery. Featuring bizarre
makeup effects by Rick Baker and a daring performance by Deborah Harry
(of Blondie fame) as Wood's sadomasochistic girlfriend,
Videodrome is pure Cronenberg--unsettling, intelligent, and
decidedly not for every taste. --Jeff Shannon
