This stunning film, grim and graphic at nearly every turn, is an incredible early work by David Cronenberg when he was still into his "body horror" cycle. ("The Dead Zone", done the same year, broke him free for a moment.) James Woods delivers an amiable performance as Max Renn, operator / part owner of a small time cable TV station. He's looking for edgy new programming, and his employee Harlan (Peter Dvorsky) shows him the pirated transmissions of a hideous series dubbed "Videodrome". There are no stories to speak of, it's just straight-ahead torture and degradation. Well, as it turns out, viewing Videodrome causes freaky and strikingly violent hallucinations for just about anybody.Taking a journey into the worlds of David Cronenberg is always interesting, if nothing else. And "interesting" is never a bad quality to possess. Some people may wince at the effects sequences in these early movies, but they are evidence of the way that Cronenberg could often appeal to adult intellects as well as affect them at gut level.Here, he hypothesizes that television and technology are so ingrained into human experience and existence that they can become part of our physical makeup, so to speak. His themes are prophetic; "Videodrome" could be seen as a way-ahead-of-the-game forerunner to the "torture porn" sub genre that exploded in the 21st century. And the desire for some networks and stations to try to draw people in with entertainment that they can't get anywhere else has remained relevant over the decades.Approximately 35 years later, the wonderfully gross Rick Baker effects lose none of their power to amaze. This viewer was particuarly delighted by the pulsating videotape and television set, and by that "flesh gun" that results when a regular gun is fused into Max's body.Cinematographer Mark Irwin and composer Howard Shore do typically excellent work. This is also a nice showcase for a solid cast: Woods, Sonja Smits, Deborah Harry (the Blondie singer looks VIVACIOUS, and is intriguing as an enigmatic woman who gets off on physical pain), Lynne Gorman, Jack Creley, Dvorsky, and Les Carlson as Barry Convex, the villain of the piece.After all this time, the new flesh is still living a very long life.Eight out of 10.

Cronenberg's body horror presciently burrows into the hallucinatory immersion of virtual reality more than 30 years ago, VIDEODROME, its title refers to a series of video images with contents of mondo exploitation, torture and murder, which entice our protagonist Max Renn (Woods) into an almost involuntary addiction to its subversiveness and perverse sexual gratifications. Renn is the president of a Toronto-based television station, which specializes in producing subterranean programs consist of violence and soft-core pornography to a niche market. So, the discovery of Videodrome thrills him to the core, after shares it with his new acquaintance, a luscious radio host Nicki Brand (Harry, in her iconic filmic bravura), whose masochistic proclivity surprises him, Max begins to trace down the original source of Videodrome, which leads him to Bianca (Smits), the daughter of Professor Brian O'Blivion (Creley), one of the in-crowds, but only gets further befuddled by the video cassettes he is offered to watch, which elicit the eeriest hallucination starting from a suddenly animated cassette and a throbbing TV set, into which he can submerge his face, then he rips his own abdomen open and puts a pistol inside. This is a high water-mark for special effects and makeup work, under the supervision of the now legendary Rick Baker, before things turn into more conventional bloodbath and repugnant viscous mutations (quite Cronenberg's trademark) during Max's killing spree when he is brainwashed into slaughtering his colleagues, until he is rescued by Bianca, and enlightened into a "leave the old flesh"rebellion towards those who are behind this largely unspecified conspiracy theory, and finally accepts his predestined fate, to embrace his new flash in a nihilistic finale. By my lights, Videodrome is designed to eliminate those who are easily subjected to what it offers by fostering a certain brain tumor into the addicted viewers, so as to cull the deprived-minded from the mass and make North America strong again, which is an ingenious idea, but under the film's succinct length and Cronenberg's preference of stimulating our ocular sense, it doesn't hit the mark. The cast is utilitarian, James Woods can be very arresting on top of his every-man appearance, emblazoned by his maniac detachment; Debbie Harry, the leading singer of Blondie, is purely designed as a beacon of lust and self-destruction, heightened by the gratuitous nudity, and Peter Dvorsky, as Max's tech-savvy sidekick Harlan, serves as a key conspirator as a well-conceived game-changer. As an analog-era surreal horror, VIDEODROME bears the trappings of the epoch with the now obsolete video cassettes, cathode ray tubes and shoulder-padding garments, but what still remains as a hot-button topic is its savvy forewarning of the televised stimuli on individuals, now predominantly in the form of ubiquitous computer, laptop, pad, cell-phone screens, a trend seems to be unstoppable, it deeply shifts our way of assimilating information and communicating with others, not to mention, in the movie, there is also a prototype of VR helmet, as unwieldy and intimidating as it should be, we are expected to feel scary about it, but now, in 2017, many of us would take that gizmo immediately to luxuriate in a state of euphoria and get a kick into an unmapped un-reality so damning enthralling but also potentially perilous, yet, this is the future, and it is coming, which makes Cronenberg's vintage horror a more reflective and trenchantly ironic fable,

This is probably David Cronenberg's best movie. Extremely underrated and well ahead of it's time, it could have easily been a book written by William Burroughs or James Ballard. The thematic of this post-modern masterpiece is once again the classic Cronenberg obsession with the ways technology completely transforms the human body and soul (and vice versa). Do not mind the cheesy trailer (80s) and don't miss the opportunity to enter the Cronenberg universe in it's most complete form. Long live the new flesh! "The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: the Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television" Grade: A+

Protagonist Max Renn runs the sleazy Channel 83 in Toronto and is constantly on the lookout for the next thing. Then one of his employees shows him something strange; a satellite broadcast known as Videodrome that appears to show torture and murder. At first they can only lock onto the signal for a minute and believe it is being broadcast from Malaysia… later they learn it is actually coming from Pittsburgh! Soon after he first sees Videodrome he starts to hallucinate and from then on it is hard to know what is real and what he is imagining. In what follows we see a strange opening appear in Max's abdomen; he later inserts Betamax tapes into this slot. He investigates the company behind Videodrome and learns that it is a plot to effect everybody… will he be turned into their pawn or will he destroy Videodrome?This is definitely a very strange film; indeed for much of the time we don't know if what we are seeing is actually what is happening or if it is just part of the hallucination; in fact there are parts that look as if they are meant to be real but we are later told weren't… of course there is no way of knowing if that later information is real or not! It might sound very confusing but it isn't… it almost doesn't matter if what we see is meant to be real… that is the point of Videodrome. While there are only a few scenes that would qualify as a bit gross there are several disturbing moments. The pre-CGI special effects are impressive and add to the films strangeness… most notably the strange slot that appears in Max's abdomen and the way a gun fuses to his hand and becomes part of him. James Woods does a fine job portraying Max Renn as things get weirder and weirder; making us believe that the character believes in what he is happening to him. Overall I'd certainly recommend this film if only for its weirdness; there are some disturbing moments but nothing that is likely so offend horror fans.