Death to Videodrome, Long live the new flesh!

For my third film by David Cronenberg I watched his 1981 cult classic Videodrome. This movie, starring James Wood, tells the story of a sleazy TV station executive who is always looking for something new and edgy for his station. He stumbles upon a video feed of basically an orange room where he witnesses purely acts of rape, torture, and murder and nothing more. He is strangely compelled to watch the tape, but suddenly realizes that he starts hallucinating from it. These hallucinations start out small but eventually over take him, making him think that he has a whole in his stomach and other such abnormalities. We realize that the feed, Videodrome, is actually just a tape that gives people brain tumors that make them hallucinate and in a way mind controlled. This was his co-worker and the creator of Videodromes plans all along, and they try to make him an assassin and release Videodrome onto an unsuspecting public.

Once again, Cronenberg returns in fabulous, gory form, even more unrestrained in his 80's form as this was long before he acquired mainstream fame. Such examples as mutilation during sex and the eruption of tumors from a shot mans head and body exemplify his love of body horror and attempts to "gross" audiences out at every corner.

James Wood does a surprisingly good job as the protaganist of the movie, documenting a descent into madness not unlike , yet in a more humorous way, Ellen Bursten in Requiem for a Dream and keeps his character throughout the whole film. It is particularly amusing, in a sadistic way, to watch him shoot up his co-workers with a "Meat Gun" that is grafted to his arm through his hallucination.

In typical Cronenberg fashion, the camera angles change frequently but are for the most part static so they do not move around the actors much. Most of the movie, as opposed to his other films, are seen through the action and less through the dialogue which is atypical for him and is something that he might have grown more into as his career developed.

Videodrome was, bar none, my favorite Cronenberg movie and a great way to end the study on this director.