MY CALL: This film boils down to two truly epic, memorable, gory scenes bookending an otherwise unhorror-ish but more thriller-ish cops’n’crime shoot’em up style movie. Clearly a classic, and it deserves to be recognized as such, but today it just doesn’t entertain or shock or titillate like so many of Cronenberg’s other films of the era (e.g., The Fly, Videodrome, The Brood) still do today. MORE MOVIES LIKE The Brood: For more of Cronenberg’s social commentary on therapy and social engineering, consider The Brood (1979) or Videodrome (1983).
This film sets its dire tone very early when a man is “scanned” before a group of academics only to have his head explode into visceral chunks in one of the most famous on-screen head trauma death scenes of all time. The perpetrator of this cephalic party-popping is a dangerous rogue scanner named Darryl (Michael Ironside; Starship Troopers, Total Recall, Visiting Hours, Prom Night II, Watchers), the villain of our story.
Canadian director and writer David Cronenberg (The Fly, Rabid, Videodrome, The Brood) makes some serious statements about modern psychology and metaphysics in this 80s horror oddity. Scanners have psychic telepathic powers to read minds and control behavior. Such powers in the wrong hands pose significant threats to regular people. So to control these dangerous scanners, a drug called Ephemerol is developed to dull these psychics’ extrasensory powers, and thus keep their powers under control. It’s not unlike what we find in comic books and superhero movies when employing a mutant power-suppressing collar in Deadpool 2 (2018) or when exposing Superman to Kryptonite. Only here, it feels more a tool a social manipulation and suppression.
To infiltrate these rogue scanners, Dr. Ruth (Patrick McGoohan; Braveheart) recruits his own psychic Cameron (Stephen Lack; Dead Ringers) to track down Darryl and stop him. As he learns to harness his newfound abilities, Cameron acquires the help of fellow scanner Kim (Jennifer O’Neill) along the way.
Outside of the one epic exploding head death scene in the beginning, very little of visual interest transpires. This is all plot and very little gore, limited to frequent bloody gun violence. That is, until the finale psychic duel which brings a heavy dose of practical effects including blood-spurting pulsating veins, exploding eyes, incineration and the like while staring so hard you look like you just might crap yourself!
All told, the film doesn’t hold up phenomenally (mostly considering first-time viewers)… but that’s not to say it doesn’t hold up at all. I still enjoyed it, even if it felt quite slow when considering the rate of special effects delivery—basically the two epic bookended scenes. Clearly a classic, and deserving to be recognized as such, but today it just doesn’t entertain or shock or titillate like so many of Cronenberg’s other films of the era (e.g., The Fly, Videodrome, The Brood) still do today.
