David Cronenberg wrote and directed sci fiction/horror classics. Unique, mentally engaging and disturbing all at the same time.
I still think the best psychopath I have seen portrayed in a movie, or at least the most believable, was David Cronenberg in Clive Barkers Night Breed. You gotta see it just for Cronenberg's part, the mask, the fact he was a psychiatrist and that calm creepy voice. Memorable. Anyway....
Videodrone is a Cronenberg movie through and through. It draws from the idea of how reality situations on a medium like television could become more extreme; such as a pirate signal, image, or sequence that shocks an audience that normally would not have been prepared for horrific realist scenes of murder and torture. Then a desensitized and possibly curious/aroused aspect takes place and the viewer becomes addicted. Remember this was the early 1980's when Videodrone came out, the VHS video market was just beginning to become widespread; so it was time when the concept of a 'video nasty' emerged. More so the compact aspect of video media, meaning that everyone was either filming something with their VCR recorders in some shape or form. I guess Cronenberg was looking at the unknown elements of a massive wave of new media from all sources.
Videodrone is a critique of mindless media, but balances that criticism by asserting that manipulation by the overindulged has occurred by the unscrupulous. Which could be government or otherwise. It is a intense movie, violent, poignant and provoking in it's attempt to look at popular media (80's video style) to see where the downside could be in an over-saturated media orientated society.
And what a downside it is, a toxic signal from the TV show Videodrone (ultra reality violence) causes the viewers to eventually develop brain tumors. A kinda underlying trade off in which a culling of the viewers occurs as they become more addicted to extreme sex and violence.
Yes, Videodrone is a futurist type movie albeit a future that is unsettling. So what is portrayed in Videodrone is a not so subtle comment on mass media consumption. In that sense Videodrone, although unimagined by Crononberg, has somewhat arrived via the explosion of the internet (minus the hallucination's/brain tumors and conspiracy theories...well for me anyway) as a portal to voyeur extremities, y'know sex at one site (or a million sites) and ultra violence at another (latest beheading clip upload from Yeman straight to your desktop). Rapid succession of media bombardment, as an unconstrained thirst for the next extreme drives media content on the Internet.
Alright Videodrone is just a movie, but damn Cronenberg got some things very, very right in his expose of extreme media and manipulation. Watch for the pseudonym name (character in Videodrone) called Oblivion (ref: tube clip) in it's present parallels to internet names (no morbius glass isn't my name either...scary).
For previous morbius glass schlock, horror, 80’s, grindhouse, sex and violence movie marathon posts, click here
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