31 Nightmares: Videodrome · 3:20am Oct 23rd, 2014
Death to Videodrome.
This is one of my favorite movies by one of my favorite directors, David motherfucking Cronnenburg.
It follows the story of Max Renn, the owner of a small, Canadian tv station specializing in exploitation films and soft core pornography. He is shown a very strange show, at first it seems like run of the mill torture porn but soon he finds the truth is something much, much worse.
But is it the truth? The videodrome signal does strange things to your mind. It makes you see things that aren’t there and it soon becomes apperent that nothing we see can really be trusted as the film goes deeper and deeper into a strange world of warped hallucinations, grotesque mutations and dark groups with sinister, secret agendas.
In short I fucking adore this fucking movie. It is at once a very intelligent examination of exploitation films, society’s reactions to them, the way even the most laudable ideology should be critically examined lest it make you its slave, and the way technology changes the way we look at and interact with the world around us.
It is also a movie where the main character finds what can only be described as a giant cancerous vagina growing on his abdomen and proceeds to masturbate it with a hand gun.
Videodrome is a brilliant movie but it does have a flaw, one that is not its fault. Technology simply moved on in a way that made it into an unintentional period piece.
This is one of the few movies where I actually feel that maybe it does need to be remade, perhaps even once every few years when technology shifts because its message is one that I feel needs to be out there, and it would be better if we don’t have to explain what the hell video cassettes are.
If you’ve never seen this before, I urge you to do so as soon as possible. The directing and effects are brilliant, the writing tight and compelling and the acting amazing, particularly James Woods as Max Renn.
Tomorrow we return to the living dead. The Doctor, well, the med student is in…
I'm sold.
2550689 The hilarious part is that for me at least that's not even the most weird or disturbing scene in the movie.