I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

Movies You Watch Because Of Who's In Them



Videodrome (1983)

I heard about this movie, funny enough, from Family Guy when James Woods first becomes friends with Peter Griffin. They want to watch a movie, Peter suggests one but James wants this one. Peter asks, "Is there any nudity in it?" James says "Yes, I do get naked." "Oh." So because it's listed as a horror film and because Family Guy mentioned it, when it came up, I had to take a peek. Oy vey. This was a weird, long trip that would have probably made a lot more sense if I took LSD. Or was half in a coma. Either way, it would have been just as plausible. But since it is a David Cronenberg movie, that is probably to be expected. He's a weird dude. If you've seen any of his other movies you know what I mean.

Okay TV talking is all right, just keep your clothes on.

For instance, I watched the whole thing (in segments, I just couldn't do it all at once) and not once did I know it was actually supposed to be taking place in Toronto and was all filmed in Canada. I was either being particularly inept, or the movie just didn't do a good job of explaining things. I'm going to go with the latter. We have Max Renn, a sleazeball who runs a soft-porn TV station (I guess that should have told me it wasn't America) but Max is tired of the soft-core stuff and wants something a little more sensational. He asks his friend Harlan who for some reason keeps calling him Patron if he can find something new. Harlan says he has pirated off of satellite a new kind of broadcast called Videodrome. After seeing just a few seconds of the fuzzy imagery, Max has Harlan work on stealing an entire 'episode'. Nice guys. Basically what Videodrome shows is S&M and snuff film kind of stuff. Harlan tells him it's supposed to be from Malaysia, but he 'tracked' it somehow and it's really in Pittsburgh. Maybe that's what threw me off about the whole Canadian thing.

Safe sex?

Woof, how to make this not a thousand pages long - Max meets radio personality Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry) and they quickly start an affair. Seeing both of them  naked - was not appealing. At all. When Nicki learns of Videodrome, being into self-inflicted pain herself she decides to find them to 'audition'. Really? How exactly does one 'audition' for a snuff film? If I went into this... we'd be here forever. Let me try hard to sum this up.

I always wondered what was inside a TV.

Max is messed with big time - the basic premise being I guess that a Professor O'Blivion had a brain tumor that he claimed was not just a mass of flesh but he was actually evolving and it had resulted from him hearing a certain video signal. Ooookay. Moving on... the more Videodrome Max sees, the more his reality starts getting messed with. He sees video tapes 'breathe', whips a TV believing it to be Nicki (don't ask please) and an opening keeps appearing in his gut where various things get stored (a gun and a videotape for example). Not making a lick of sense is it? And I really, really tried to pay close attention too.

Bad TV! No dessert for you! Bad! Bad!

Okay, he finds the 'source' which is O'Blivion's daughter, as the Professor has been dead almost a year. Again, please don't ask because he then discovers another 'source' hidden in a business called Spectacular Optical (an eyeglass store) and they mess with his head too. So now he's hallucinating all over the place. There's one scene where they put an electronic 'box' on his head to 'record' his hallucinations - but was that a hallucination too - 'cause he wakes up in his own bed. We then are thrust into the 'what part of the movie is real and what is just going on in Max's head?' kind of movie, which I personally hate because then logic and plot progression goes right out the window and anything goes and they don't have to explain anything. Which they really don't.

I'm melting... melting....

To sum up, he's 'programmed' to kill his partners at the TV station, then goes after O'Blivion's daughter. She 'reprograms' him to go kill the other guys (which includes his friend Harlan who actually was working for the guys hiding in the eyeglass store - actually that part was kind of cool because for some reason he explodes through a stone wall - again, no explanation why) and then go after the main Videodrome guy, shooting him in front of tons of people at an eyeglass convention, after which the body slowly bubbles out and becomes a real mess of... stuff. He is then ordered to kill himself to 'progress' to a new level. He does. The end.

It's gonna hurt but it's the only way out of this movie.

What the hell was this movie about anyway? Geez Louise I usually like interesting theories about how visual and auditory media can mess with us but this was just a mess. With Max making statements like "I am the video world made flesh." and "Long live the new flesh." we are totally messed with and really, I dare anybody to watch this thing and make a lick of sense out of it. 

Anybody got a flesh VCR?

Video cassettes playing in his gut? His gun becoming 'flesh' and part of his arm? Exploding and bubbling people? TV's appearing out of nowhere to  'talk' to him? What the hell? Whatever message Cronenberg was trying to make about the effect TV has on our lives, he lost us big time through this menagerie of images and concepts. Yeesh.