VIDEODROME is David Cronenberg’s groundbreaking techno-surrealist vision on television, technology, and politics. It involves the CEO of a small UHF television station (James Woods) as he discovers a pirate signal featuring extreme violence and sexual torture. The more he learns, the more layers emerge—increasingly violent and bizarre hallucinations and mind control, which lead to a technology that threatens to alter reality.
In fact, it is so far in advance of actual technology that it projects nearly all of the horrors that would spring up on the internet onto the only technology available at the time—television and videotape. It was the dawn of the video age and the vision seems to fit that mold.
And, since this is Cronenberg, you know the body horror is coming and it is coming strong! Ignore the usual sadomasochistic, sado-sexual stuff (it’s in there) but the magic of the horrors that await is so off-beat as to make one disoriented. Woods is as baffled as the viewer, of course, perhaps moreso when he awakes to find a betamax portal in his upper stomach from which a gun is holstered.
From there, the movie gets more political and may even lose a little bit of it’s momentum even if it gains a bit in depth. A work of mindbending descent into madness, it is Cronenberg at his best.
Heres a little teaser to tickle the medulla oblongata…
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