David Cronenberg takes the old adage ‘your eyes will go square from watching too much television’ and brings it to gruesome life in this 80s cult horror classic. Surreal, disorientating and just a bit weird, this film is a satire on the obsession with television and the blurring lines of reality it creates.
Looking for edgier material for his low-rent TV channel, sleazy executive Max Renn (James Woods) hacks into a broadcast of pirate channel, Videodrome, which shows pornographic snuff films of actual murders. Equally appalled and intrigued, Max sets out to find out more about the makers of the programme. However his life rapidly dissolves around him and he finds himself at the centre of a conflict between opposing factions in the struggle to control the minds of Americans.
Cronenberg serves up bodily transformation and graphic violence aplenty, and the very 80s-era special effects still hold up now. It’s like an extended Twilight Zone episode; a massive VCR slot-cum-‘mangina’ in Max’s torso, a phallic flesh gun, a ‘living’ television being whipped, cigarettes stubbed out on a breast. The acting is wooden in places, especially from Debbie Harry as the seductress Nicki Brand, but Woods is on top form in his career-defining ability to roll out the sleaze. This is a cautionary tale that still holds relevance today; thirty years after Videodrome was produced we continue to debate the influence of TV on real-life violence and sexual obsession – and probably will for many more decades to come.