Videodrome: David Cronenberg has his fetish with sex and orifices front and center in most of his films. Sure, there are some exceptions, but this film is not one of them. James Woods (looking very young) is Max Renn, the president of a low-rent UHF TV station in Toronto that is known for broadcasting softcore pornography. While looking to spice up the programming with something more visceral, he is shown a copy of “Videodrome”, an amateur snuff/torture porn show that he becomes obsessed with. Soon he starts to have fairly disturbing hallucinations that overlap with what he saw on “Videodrome“. After a friend of his disappears trying to get on the show, he tries to get to the bottom of it, to determine who created it, and he finds himself being used by the people behind Videodrome, who seek to destabilize the entire country, using society’s infatuation with violence and sex against it. They manipulate his mind and body, turning him into something more than human, though it’s hard to tell what is real and what isn’t. And this being Cronenberg, we get lots of bloody internal organs, dystopic future visions, throbbing televisions and VHS cassettes, and people turned into human VCRs through large, phallic openings in their stomachs. In other words…typical Cronenberg. Still it’s visually interesting (and some of the things that Cronenberg wanted to do but couldn’t due to budget and mechanical limitations were wild). Woods does a good job here, with less of the manic intensity he seems to be channeling later in life. I will readily admit that this may be too “visceral” for some tastes, so you have been warned. Woodchuck sez, “Worth a look.”
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