The Reverend’s Review
Videodrome was first released in 1983. I was eight and a half and old enough to know the word ‘video’ had become a pop culture signifier of the future. Along with satellite TV and home computers, it signalled the dawn of a new communications era. Some people welcomed it, while other’s saw the beginnings of moral collapse. The Video Nasties panic of the early 1980s, for example, hinged on technology as much as morality. Consumers suddenly had the power to watch and rewatch things in secret, and they could even… heaven forfend… pause! It was into this cultural climate that horror titan David Cronenberg unleashed his own take on the tech revolution: Videodrome, which somehow manages to capture both the excitement of the home video age and the twitchy dread it stirred.
James Woods is Max Renn, a jaded cable TV boss who’s bored with the soft porn offerings his channel puts out. He’s looking for something edgy and
new, and finds it when he stumbles across a mysterious pirate broadcast called Videodrome, in which people are tortured and killed in a room made of red clay. It’s like the boiled-down essence of much of today’s reality TV. Yet the more Max watches it, the more confused he is about the real world. Biology and mechanics start switching places. TVs and Betamax tapes breath and pulsate with veins, while Max’s stomach mutates into a vulva-like slit turning him into a human VCR. Sounds hokey? It’s not. It’s a stunning, disturbing parable of how the media shapes us into who we are – or rather who we think we are.
Critics enjoyed Videodrome but it tanked at the box office. Mainstream folk hated the sick surrealism and others accused it of incoherent pretension, yet the film found its real life in its most fitting context: home video. Thirty years on and it’s a deserved movie classic with a chilling prophetic edge. The Marshall McLuhan-like Dr Brian Oblivion (a character who only appears on television, and only on a television) frequently spouts spookily prescient stuff: “Television is reality… and reality is less than television”. Sensing the film’s importance, Arrow Video show stellar care with this Blu-Ray, jam-packed with fascinating extras and in a crisp transfer. There’s even a second disc of the director’s early films which, at nearly three hours, could easily have been a standalone release. Essential. (For a more in-depth review of this release, visit the Reverend’s YouTube channel ‘The Flicks That Church Forgot’: www.youtube. com/watch?v=zIcYAM7SmBY)