- Maybe film isn't the right medium for stories about telepathy. After all, mental powers just aren't the sort of phenomena that lend themselves to straightforward visual representation. The audience either gets stuck listening to the dreaded voice-over (ala David Lynch's version of Dune) or has to settle for watching people stare and twitch. It is to the film's credit that David Cronenberg's Scanners seems to recognize that neither approach is terribly satisfying. Its solution, naturally, is to combine staring and twitching with things blowing up.
- And man, do things blow up! Cars crash and burst into flames, telephones melt, gas stations explode, and human heads look like something out of a Gallagher performance. Incidentally, with the release of both Scanners and Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981 must have been the banner year for cinematic exploding heads. But lest all this talk of detonations, both cranial and otherwise, gives you the wrong impression, I should also mention that the better parts of Scanners are more subtle and interesting than all that.
- In its calmer moments, Scanners depicts a strange world in which faceless corporations condition psychics to harness their powers for what we assume will be military purposes. The untutored "scanners" such as Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) tend to live like schizophrenics in need of medication. Some, like Kim Obrist (Jennifer O'Neill), establish rogue factions, while others like Daryl Revok (Michael Ironside) have more nefarious plans. The manipulative Revok, who has one of the best badguy names ever, intends to produce an entire army of scanners that will enable him to rule the world. Only Vale and his seemingly benevolent tutor, Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan), have any chance of stopping Revok's mad plans.
- While Scanners would never be mistaken for a great movie, it gets several things right. As far as the cast goes, Ironside is absolutely terrifying as a psychic insane enough to drill a hole in his head but competent enough to head a shadow organization. McGoohan, too, is well cast as a reticent doctor with a secret, and Lawrence Dane is excellent as a corrupt businessman. The film's settings, too, are quite striking. Whether out of production necessity or not, the unspecified city (at least some of which is Montreal) looks like it was filmed at 4 AM on a rainy morning, and a mad artist's lounge fits comfortably in a mega-sculpture of a human head. It's too bad that the film insisted on constantly interrupting its curious atmosphere with pyrotechnics and combustions of every sort.
- Kim Obrist was named after the assistant to the producer.
