Return to tiff.’s home page

Canadian Film Encyclopedia

Shopping Cart
 

Videodrome


Year: 1982
Language: English
Format: 35mm Colour
Runtime: 87 min
Director: David Cronenberg
Producer: Claude Héroux
Writer: David Cronenberg
Cinematographer: Mark Irwin
Editor: Ronald Sanders
Sound: Bryan Day
Music: Howard Shore
Cast: Lynne Gorman, Jayne Eastwood, Les Carlson, David Tsubouchi, Harvey Chao, Henry Gomez, Lally Cadeau, David Bolt, Reiner Schwartz, Julie Khaner, Jack Creley, Peter Dvorsky, Sonja Smits, Deborah Harry, James Woods
Production Company: Filmplan international II Inc., Universal Pictures Inc.

Max Renn (Woods), a small-time cable television producer in Toronto, lacks scruples as much as he has and is driven by ambition. When Harlan (Dvor­sky), Max’s resident satellite pirate, locks in on a Pittsburgh-based sig­nal featuring sadomasochistic sex, Max is thrilled by the commercial possibil­ities and sets out to find the perpetrators of the signal known as Videodrome.

Max meets the attractive Nicki Brand (Harry) who introduces him to a va­riety of kinky sexual games. His ob­session leads him to Brian O'Blivion (Creley), a media expert who only ex­ists on television, and his daughter, Bianca (Smits). Max is soon drawn into a nightmare of hallucination, mind control and identity fragmenta­tion. It becomes apparent that Max is — and has been all along — at the mercy of a sinister Orwellian conspiracy of business interests that devised the Videodrome signal as a means of entering and altering the minds of any­one exposed to it. By the time Max makes this discovery, it appears to be too late for him to do anything about it.

Video­drome is one of David Cronenberg's most pro­found and accomplished films — a searing vision of a society trapped within its own, often incoherent, technological illusions. At the same time, it is a telling portrait of an "innocent" Canada, bedevilled by media that’s not of its own making. Max Renn, the television entrepreneur, is more interested in disseminating images created by others than creating and disseminating his own images.

Related Entries