Videodrome (1983)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Max Renn	James Woods
Bianca O'Blivion	Sonja Smits	½
Nicki Brand	Deborah Harry
Harlan	Peter Dvorsky	½
Barry Convex	Leslie Carlson
Brian O'Blivion	Jack Creley
Masha	Lynne Gorman

Review

David Cronenberg, the venereal horror servant, tried to be prophetic when he in 1983 created this grim and supposedly allegorical account on television's potential power on humans and the fine line between real life and life through the cable. The opening part is promising, with intrepid thematics and suggestive visualizations in which we're confronted with the concept of exploitation and cynisism versus stimulation and voyeurism. Mind control was widely discussed on film in the early 1980s, and Videodrome tries to take this to the next level through television-controlled hypnosis, but when Cronenberg abandons his logico-semantic groundwork and embarks on what he probably considered a rich surrealistic tale, the film loses all its potency and thematic relevance. Cronenberg once said that he had no rules as a filmmaker. With Videodrome in mind, his statement is easy to believe. Unfortunately, the lack of rules in this film simply makes it insignificant and boring, not intriguing and challenging as when he sixteen years later made eXistenZ - a film which deals with largely the same subject matter, but in a far more uniform and playful manner.