It had a great concept, a sleazy cable channel operator, Max Renn, always on the prowl for more sleaze, finds this mysterious cable channel full of pointless sex and violence, which turns him and his degenerate girlfriend on. Then throw in some Marshall MacLuhan professor type who communicates to the world via video cassettes and runs a mission where society's outcasts are rehabilitated by letting them watch TV in their own cubicles. There is lots of messaging about bad media addictions and a polluted TV culture, But this Videodrome pirate channel is more than just a new low of non-stop sex and violence, it reprograms the TV addict's body to do things like grow a VCR tape slot in the stomach and have wild violent hallucinations. Here is where it gets the Cronenberg gore special efx touch which eventually undoes the movie.
In one scene, after the changed Max fights back against the Videodrome people with the help of the professor's daughter, his old technical wizard attempts to reprogram him by sticking a new pulsating lifelike VCR tape in his stomach slot. Just like the Thing, his hand goes into Max's stomach but instead of Max's whatever is inside him just chomping the tech's hand off, it turns the tech's hand into some sort of grenade that causes the tech to explode, blowing a few precut cinder blocks loose. Then Max goes on some more gory revenge scenes and it ends up really dumb in the end.
So Cronenberg takes a good concept and theme and essentially does little better than what his fictitious cable channel did, feed us some gore and R light sex under the guise of exploring the dark side of the media. This is why I never regarding the director as anything more than a clever shock jock with little artistic or social vision. But in Canada, he is still a hero, small country I guess.
In one scene, after the changed Max fights back against the Videodrome people with the help of the professor's daughter, his old technical wizard attempts to reprogram him by sticking a new pulsating lifelike VCR tape in his stomach slot. Just like the Thing, his hand goes into Max's stomach but instead of Max's whatever is inside him just chomping the tech's hand off, it turns the tech's hand into some sort of grenade that causes the tech to explode, blowing a few precut cinder blocks loose. Then Max goes on some more gory revenge scenes and it ends up really dumb in the end.
So Cronenberg takes a good concept and theme and essentially does little better than what his fictitious cable channel did, feed us some gore and R light sex under the guise of exploring the dark side of the media. This is why I never regarding the director as anything more than a clever shock jock with little artistic or social vision. But in Canada, he is still a hero, small country I guess.