- While the advent of DVDs has been a overwhelmingly positive development for home cinema, there's something decidedly less personal about digital media than its boxy analog counterparts. I mean, could you imagine if the early 00's horror film The Ring had featured a haunted DVD or, god forbid, evil streaming online content? No, it had to be VHS for deep-seated psychological reasons that I don't even want to try to identify. Whatever else Videodrome may be, it is a film that obviously appreciates the good old-fashioned potential malevolence of a stray video tape.
- So what else is Videodrome? Well, it's a film predicated on the idea that a video tape can grant its watcher some combination of hallucinations and tumors, which is admittedly an interesting concept. The target of this bizarre attack is a sleazy TV producer named Max Renn (James Woods), whose small-time station ekes out an existence by pandering to a "lowest common denominator" type of audience. When Max isn't screening smut like (the wonderfully titled) "Samurai Dreams," he's looking for something hard, something tough, and whatever's going to be the next big thing. Imagine his surprise when he stumbles upon a pirated program called "Videodrome" that depicts televised torture, plain and simple. The problem is, it looks a little too real. For someone like Max, that's part of the draw.
- But here's where things start to get a little confusing for Max and audience alike. After Max's kinky girlfriend, media critic Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry!), heads off to Pittsburgh to track down the pirated signal, she makes a cameo appearance on Videodrome itself. That's also right around the time that Max initiates a relationship with his swollen television set and sticks a pulsating videotape into a rather labial hole in his chest. Also, he sees a dead woman in his bed. And a gun grafts onto his hand. Maybe the only man who can save him is tele-philosopher Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley), whose entire life has been preserved on tape by his devoted daughter Bianca (Sonja Smits)? Or maybe optometrist-turned-producer Barry Convex (Leslie Carlson) and his virtual reality helmet that looks like something out of a phrenology exhibit?
- Random fact: Philip K. Dick died a year before this film was released.
- In my book, Videodrome is one of those films for which the review is the description. What could I possibly add to the fact that Max sticks a videotape in his chest? On one hand, you have to give some credit to directors who aren't afraid to make memorable, reasonably well-directed, batshit crazy films that fly in the face of everything we know about traditional storytelling, reality, and/or pleasantness (two such directors have the first name David). On the other hand, such films can probably never be truly great because they go so completely off the rails as to sacrifice relatability. Somewhere inside Videodrome was a really interesting story about a world in which a man who exists only on tape runs a shelter that shows television to the homeless. Unfortunately, that and some of the other intriguing aspects of the story got buried in the extreme weirdness. So yeah, death to Videodrome, long live the new flesh, etc. I think I'd rather go watch Network.
