Criterion Confessions

This post originally written in 2011 for DVDTalk.com.




I'm not one that normally buys into the whole spoiler thing. It gets a little ridiculous. Some people assume any detail about a movie is absolutely crucial and act like you've spit in their popcorn if you get specific at all. Here's a spoiler for you: the internet could stand to chill.

That said, occasionally there is a movie so off-beat, so unpredictable, so mesmerizing, that I really want to reveal as little as possible, it's so much better if you go and find out on your own. The latest from Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In, is just such a film. It's very good, very creepy, and even if you've seen the trailer, most of the mysteries that this disturbing gem holds remain to be discovered.


The basics that I can tell you: Antonio Banderas has once again teamed up with the Spanish director who made him a star. Here he plays Robert Ledgard, a brilliant plastic surgeon who has been working in secret on a synthesized skin that is resistant to fire and insect bites. He lost his wife to burns resulting from a car crash, and he has been so intent on keeping others from suffering the same agony, he has been conducting taboo experiments in the private clinic he built into his mansion. He performs the skin experiments on one patient, a troubled young woman named Vera (Elena Anaya, Mesrine [review]) whom he keeps locked in the bedroom next to his and obsessively observes her via a giant-sized flatscreen, almost like he's looking through the wall itself.

Vera never leaves her room, and she never interacts directly with anyone but Robert. His staff sends her food and other things through a dumbwaiter. Most of Robert's affairs are run by the maternal Marilia (Marisa Paredes, The Devil's Backbone). She has been with Robert since he was a child, and knows him even better than her own son (Roberto Alamo), who grew up to be a criminal. No one else knows that Vera is there or has any inkling as to why. What Robert is doing will certainly have a questionable outcome, but he is blinded to the consequences by his tragic past. As more details of what happened prior become clear, what will happen next becomes even hazier.


The Skin I Live In is, essentially, a horror movie. It doesn't have ghosts or things going bump in the night, nor is it really a slasher flick. Almodóvar dabbles more in an unsettling, psychological brand of horror. I was reminded of both Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face and David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers while watching The Skin I Live In. All three of those movies made me uncomfortable in delightfully nasty ways. They all share a tradition of doctors with ice water in their veins who step away from conventional procedure in search of something more personal. The breach of ethics leads them down dangerous roads, and what they find is seriously gruesome. Banderas is splendid as the slimy scientist. His madness is in how clear his vision is. His private plan is exacting and thorough. The only thing he didn't count on is what the results stir up in himself.

Also very good is Anaya--though, again, it's hard to tell you exactly why without jumping too deep into the plot. Suffice to say, she handles the trickier aspects of Almodóvar's script (which is adapted from a novel by Thierry Jonquet). It's a credit to both the actress and her director that after we come to understand certain things about Vera, we never look at her quite the same. It's hard to say if she's really changed, but so much of storytelling is an invisible art. Perhaps Elena Anaya does do something different, perhaps she has just been different all along and our eyes are only just being opened to it.


It's an unimportant question, really. All that matters is how immersed you are in the going's on that wherever the trick lies, the illusion is imperceptible. Almodóvar's execution of the material is exacting, so meticulously designed, he could get away with almost anything. Robert's house is an incredible set, with every detail from the paintings on the walls to the seemingly limitless number of doors through which anyone could go, be they on the hunt or looking to escape, chosen in order to have as much of a visual effect on the audience as anything that happens in the narrative. It's not just about the particulars of what occurs, it's how it occurs and where. It's the pervasive mood of the piece.

The result is that The Skin I Live In does settle over the viewer like a second skin--albeit one you will quickly want to shed. It's going to be harder than you think, though. The movie will most likely follow you around for the rest of the day, if not longer. Which is exactly what you should expect from a good horror movie. If you aren't appropriately horrified, what's the point?

Back in high school and on through college, I worked a story called Lords of Order, first writing it as a graphic novel and then a screenplay. Intended as the opening of a trilogy (and predicting the three brothers structure of my eventual prose novels), the story was a gritty fantasy about teenagers with psychic powers being preyed upon by an evil corporation that may have had a hand in their creation. It was a John Hughes version of the X-Men, in its way, but now I see it was also quite a bit like an adolescent version of Scanners.

Released in 1981, Scanners was David Cronenberg’s fourth movie, and essential in his emergence as a prominent auteur. Scanners set the groundwork for both Videodrome [review] and The Dead Zone in terms of approach and theme. It’s effective for what it is, a B movie with a firm grasp of its own schlock, highlighted by impressive practical effects. One of the film’s earliest bits of gore, when a man’s head explodes, has found new life on the internet as an animated gif. Its bloody climax, however, may be the most effective, if not easily the grossest. If you want to talk about the psychic travails of puberty, I am pretty sure anyone who had any kind of acne problem can relate to the squirting pustules growing on Michael Ironside and Steven Lack’s faces.


The two men lead the film, both playing the titular “scanners,” the name Cronenberg gives to people with extraordinary mental powers. Their main ability is telepathy via direct linkage of their nervous system with another’s. Once connected, they can read minds and also influence the other person’s actions--but at great physical expense for themselves and their victim. They also seem to be able to inspire spontaneous combustion in a manner that is never explained, and hack into computers in a manner that shouldn’t have been.


Lack plays Cameron Vale, a scanner who is taken into custody by a nefarious corporation and its lead scientist, Dr. Ruth (The Prisoner’s Patrick McGoohan). The company is trying to cultivate scanners for espionage and other unsavory purposes, but they find themselves at odds with a rogue scanner, Darryl Revok (Ironside). Revok is looking to unite all known scanners, and killing the ones who refuse. Ruth and his cronies dispatch Vale to find the bad man, though the more he looks, the more Vale realizes not everything is on the up and up.


Cronenberg’s script is scrappy, but also threadbare. There is actually very little to the plot, and many scenes slam together without much connective tissue. Vale’s investigative skills seem to rely more on psychic predictions than real detection, and the gunmen who follow him around are never adequately accounted for. Scanners feels as if Cronenberg either didn’t have the budget to shoot more story, or simply didn’t care about why or how he’d get to the scenes of exploding heads and cars. The truth may be somewhere in the middle, as reportedly the filmmaker was rushed into production before there was a complete script with instructions to finish in time to qualify for a tax break.


Fans of blood-and-guts horror probably don’t care, however, and one could probably make some pretty good critical hay out of the political implications of weaponized genetics, particularly as science continues to learn more and more about how we are put together. For me, Scanners could have used with a bit more character work. The choice to make Vale a blank slate means we never quite grasp his motivation. Likewise, Revok is never permitted to preen in his villainy. Surely there was some Thanos-like justification for his mission Cronenberg could have injected here, but much like my bad adolescent writing, the only real driver seems to be possessing the power itself. Which isn’t really all that relatable and exciting for us normal folk out here in the audience. Though, maybe now I can resurrect that old script and fix it based on the lessons I gleaned from Scanners.

But probably not.

A round-up of the non-Criterion movies I saw in December.



IN THEATRES...


* The Adventures of Tintin, a surprisingly fun 3D adventure from Steven Spielberg with all the appropriate nods to Hergé.

* The Artist, a loving and entirely accurate tribute to the silent era of cinema.

* A Dangerous Method, Jung and Freud meet David Cronenberg.
* Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, is an absolute corker. Brad Bird delivers the best in the series.

* We Bought a Zoo, an effective new feature from Cameron Crowe...but is it any good?




ON DVD/BD...

* The Art of Getting By, a predictable but solid Young Adult story, with fine performances by Emma Roberts and Freddie Highmore.

* Behind the Mask, a mid-40s misfire that attempts to turn the popular Shadow radio serials into...light comedy?!

* The Birth of a Nation: Deluxe 3-Disc Edition, D.W. Griffith's historically inaccurate epic is an important piece of cinema, but that doesn't stop it from being racist and boring.

* Crime Story: The Complete Series, the Michael Mann police drama set in the 1960s but made in the 1980s.

* A Farewell to Arms, Frank Borzage's masterfully melodramatic adaptation of Ernest Hemingway.

* Friends with Benefits, not even Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis can make this sex comedy misfire come off as either sexy or funny.

* Incident in an Alley, a middling early 1960s crime film based on a Rod Serling short story.

* Nothing Sacred, a slight bit of entertainment from 1937, directed by William Wellmen and starring Carole Lombard and Frederic March.

* Seven Chances, an hilarious Buster Keaton short where the great comedian plays a man in desperate need of a wife.

"Ignore the nightmare in the bathroom." - Raoul Duke (surely, if not an old proverb already, it will be eventually).

True story: half an hour after watching Terry Gilliam's 1998 adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas this morning, I was walking down my street. As I passed a house where some contractors were working on a remodel, I overheard one of the contractors explaining to the other about the "Paul is Dead" conspiracy surrounding the Abbey Road album cover. "George was dressed as a gravedigger," he said, "and Paul wasn't wearing any shoes."

Clearly something is in the ether today. The Beatles released Abbey Road, the last album they recorded, in late 1969. Within a year, they were no more, arguably closing the door on 1960s pop culture, following the zeitgeist of the decade right down the tubes. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is set in 1971. The peace-and-love generation is long gone, and chaos only exists in its place. Hunter S. Thompson's story of tumbling into a drug-fueled rabbit hole of decadence and danger was a harbinger of the decade that was to follow. Like the dust cloud at the motorcycle race he is sent to Sin City to cover, the 1970s would be a brown maelstrom of disappointment and disaster. Political activism would give way to complacency post-Nixon, and music and fashion was becoming bloated and boring. Let's face it, if it weren't for its cinema, the 1970s would be a decade best left forgotten. Torch the records, send it away!

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was long considered an "unfilmmable" book. Like William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, it was a tome revered for the irreverent prose style and the author's willingness to engage with all things taboo, and without the quality of the former the latter was rather difficult to capture. Conventional narratives these are not, and it would take equally unconventional filmmakers to make a movie out of them. Luckily, David Cronenberg got his mitts on Naked Lunch [review], and Terry Gilliam, the former Python turned surreal fantasist, tackled Fear and Loathing.

Johnny Depp stars as Hunter S. Thompson, who went to Las Vegas as a journalist, covering an epic motorcycle race in the desert under the guise of Raoul Duke. He would also stick around to report on a convention for law enforcement officers. Ironically, their chosen subject was stopping narcotics. Thompson is a notorious druggy, and he spends the entirety of this movie hopped up on some chemical concoction or another. Along for the ride is his "attorney," the larger-than-life Dr. Gonzo, played with pure animalistic chutzpah by Benicio Del Toro. The actor gives a purely physical performance, ditching actorly mannerisms for phlegm and sweat. He is perpetually clearing himself of some sort of bodily substance, and his character has a sinister bend that is truly disturbing. By juxtaposition, Thompson is a cartoon character, and Depp plays him as such. As a performance, it is definitely one extended impression of the real deal, but Depp approaches Thompson's contrived personage with the same honest intensity as, say, Robert Downey Jr. taking on Charlie Chaplin [review]. It's less an act than it is sculpture: the karate chops and whistles chip away at the artifice until it turns into something absolutely authentic.

Plot seems irrelevant in a discussion of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The movie's script went through various permutations, including a pass by Repo Man-director Alex Cox, who is one of four credited screenwriters (Gilliam is also on the list). Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas doesn't really have a narrative arc, it's more like a narrative descent. The thrust of the story is ever downward, as each over indulgence alienates Gonzo and Thompson further from real life, to a point where things get so paranoid and weird, not even the criminal underbelly of Vegas will have anything to do with them. There is a tremendous scene here in a back-alley diner, featuring a memorable cameo by Ellen Barkin. She plays a waitress who ends up on the wrong side of Gonzo's anger, and Del Toro's beastly delivery of the threats is so convincing, it's hard to tell if Barkin is acting or if she's really scared.

It's an interesting view of Las Vegas, taking us down its glitzy ladder rung by rung, going from its most surreal heights (a version of the kiddy casino Circus Circus) to this rundown, all-too-earthly greasy spoon. It seems to me that the key to the material is in understanding that the city itself is a trippy place, that the drugs are almost a tool for comprehending its garishness. No matter how weird the hallucinations get, Vegas can match the nightmare horror for horror. Visually, Gilliam and his team make tremendous use of the city's neon landscape. A driving montage down the strip uses rear projection and cutaways to melt and bend the surrounding signs and advertisements. Overdone hotel wallpaper and carpets come alive and swallow the patrons. Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini (The Order, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus [review]) often sets the camera at an angle, so that the image leans to one-side, upsetting the equilibrium of the frame. It's almost as if the movie is trying to spill its protagonists out of the other side of the screen the way you or I might try to kick away a dog humping our leg.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is nearly formless in its construction, though it solidifies over each selective viewing. To carry the drug metaphor, you build a kind of tolerance, gaining an ability to maintain the more you partake. Though I wouldn't have said so when it was first released, I'd hazard to call it Terry Gilliam's most together movie. Not necessarily his best, but possibly the one where he is most in command of the elements. For all the bedlam depicted onscreen, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is meticulously choreographed. Many of the scenes of Gonzo and Thompson wandering through the casinos while going off their heads play for extended lengths without much cutting. In these, they are each performing independent actions, including interacting with crowds of extras. Sometimes it's super complicated, like the hotel bar when they first get to town, just before all the other drinkers turn into lizards; other times, it's more simple. When Gonzo argues their way into a Debbie Reynolds concert, Thompson stays by himself, doing more drugs on the sly. Gilliam keeps the shot wide and lets the actors move around the frame. You could watch either of them do their thing, they are both doing something interesting, and yet it also works perfectly in tandem.

Naturally, with an experience like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, there is no real exit, no grand conclusion to be had. The trip ends--in both senses of the word. The vacation is over, the vacationers have to come down off of the high. Yet, Gilliam gives us a satisfying wrap-up anyway. In his way, he has contained the chaos, and so there is a relief in making our way back out of it. Rubber hits the road, and Hunter S. Thompson heads back to Los Angeles, a smile on his face, remembering all the devils in the preceding details, having survived to return to some kind of perceived normalcy. And yet, that grin also says it's never going to be completely over: the craziest diamonds always shine on.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVDTalk.

Screen captures are from the DVD, not the Blu-Ray.

I suppose it is fitting that my memory of when I first saw Naked Lunch is hazy, as the movie itself is hazy and drug-addled and gleefully confused. I thought it came out when I was in high school, and that I had snuck down to Los Angeles from my home in the Antelope Valley to see it. My friends and I often saw arty movies that way, the stuff that didn't make it to our mall. It was less expensive than rock concerts, plus we could also get back before anyone noticed we were gone.

It turns out Cronenberg's movie came out my sophomore year in college. A limited release just after Christmas in 1991. A winter release also then makes it questionable that I thought I had seen it with a girl--the same girl who I talked about in the My Life as a Dog review. It always comes down to a girl, and quite often that girl. It would make sense that she and I would see it together as she had a fascination with the Beats, particularly Kerouac, that I didn't understand but faked a shared interest in because that's often the kind of rotten thing you do when you are desperate to get someone to love you. Other guys do it to get a girl's shirt off, but I've never been good at being a cad.

I made some noble efforts to read various works by the Beat writers, including her favorite The Dharma Bums, which I liked all right. I thought an easier route would be the poetry and even Kerouac's dream journal, which turned out to be more punishment than had I delved into the more complex prose works. I'm still fairly nonplussed by that particular literary movement. It seems to me it was a bunch of self-hating gay men sitting around with even more loathsome closet cases getting drunk and inventing a secret code to convince themselves they were clever. A college professor of mine, I think from that same year, said it succinctly when he said the problem with the Beats is that they assumed that just because it happened to them, it was interesting.

I'm not trying to be needlessly provocative here. There are a lot who will see these assessments as heresy, and if you're feeling apoplectic, brace yourself, because it's only going to get worse.

For my money, William S. Burroughs is one of the emptiest literary figureheads of all time.

There. I said it.

I've tried to understand the fascination with his work, tried to see why he has garnered so much attention from the likes of Kurt Cobain and Gus Van Sant. Maybe it's because I've never done drugs, I am not impressed by his alleged outlaw antics; then again, I've never been a bootlegger, but I love me a good movie about prohibition, so who knows? I just find his work impenetrable and needlessly obtuse. It's one of those cases where the artist hasn't given us the decoder ring, and so it seems mysterious and rebellious, so ipso facto it must be good. When I read Naked Lunch, I found it to be a ridiculous struggle to finish. I would read pages and pages of lunatic ravings about boys crapping themselves for both purposes of sex and drugs, and I would often just let the words pass, just muscle through and turn the page so that I could eventually turn the last one and put the damned thing down. In my senior year of high school, one of the members of our smarty-farty misfit group picked Naked Lunch as his subject for the multimedia report we had to do for 12th Grade AP English. He did a presentation that required volunteers to submit to series of hand-slapping exercises designed as a test geared to record a human being's tendency to adapt to pain. I found it annoying at the time that he could get away with doing something on the fly, while I spent several days adapting and filming and starring in a twenty-minute adaptation of the phone conversation from Salinger's Franny & Zooey. When I was reading the Burroughs novel some time later, my friend's report finally made sense to me. He was demonstrating what it was like to read the book, and as someone who rarely gives up on a book or film, what I would do to myself in order to see the words "The End."

Given the classic mess that is the book Naked Lunch, it's all the more impressive that David Cronenberg managed to pull a semblance of a narrative out of it in order to make his movie. Even more impressive is the fact that I actually like it.

Part of Cronenberg's successful strategy is looking beyond the single book at the whole of Burroughs' work and also his biography. He drapes the entire film in literary fabric, with the reference to Kafka in regards to the narcotic high the film's characters get from bug powder dust being a fairly telling allusion. The plot of the movie is Kafakesque with interwoven lines of paranoia, labyrinthine bureaucracies, and the self-replicating puzzle that the film's hero finds himself in.

Peter Weller plays William "Bill" Lee, an obvious Burroughs stand-in, with his monotone speaking voice, raincoat, and fedora. Bill works for an extermination company, and it turns out that his wife, Joan (Judy Davis), is stealing his roach powder and shooting it into her bloodstream with his book-writin' buddies (analogues to Kerouac and Ginsberg). A drunken accident leads to Bill shooting his wife, and he has to go on the lam, becoming a strung-out version of Hitchcock's wrong man, only this time he's pretty much the right man, he really did it.

The catch being that Bill is unwittingly locked in a plot larger than that of his regular life. He has been visited by a large insect-like creature who has informed him that Joan is really a secret agent for Interzone, a middle eastern nation somewhere in the middle of, well, not quite sure. North Africa, maybe, but also possibly reachable by bus. After the shooting, Bill meets a creature named Mugwump--it looks like a demonic alien--who instructs him to buy a typewriter for writing reports of his activities and gives him a ticket to Interzone. He can go there to hide from the law and work to take down the corporation that was controlling his wife. There is never really any indication of who this opposing force is, whose side Bill is actually working on, but that isn't really important.

Naked Lunch is a movie about doubles. Everything in the movie has a natural opposite. Even Kerouac (Nicholas Campbell), with his rough exterior and his insistence that rewriting is censorship, is mirrored by Ginsberg (Michael Zelniker), more fey and dogmatically committed to revising his poetry at least a hundred times. In Cronenberg's world, everything could be something else, nothing should be assumed to be as it seems. (Even the old-style puppetry fosters the sensation of "What do you choose to believe?" by sitting somewhere between convincing and false.) Typewriters turn into grotesque creatures with pulsing sexual organs, meaning that the act of creation is a far more intimate, sensual experience than simply banging out some words, and to use another man's typewriter could be the greatest of indiscretions. Being an undercover agent not only means you have multiple identities, but it is also perhaps a game crafted merely to mask the agents' homosexuality--or vice versa, as Bill's typewriter tells him that being queer is one of the best covers a spy could have. Seemingly struggling with his own sexuality, are Bill's hallucinations his own sexual repression breaking down? It's a less pedestrian explanation than if they are merely drug-induced fantasies. Then again, maybe it all really is happening. Even if it's imagined, it's real to Bill.

Once he is in Interzone, Bill gets wrapped up in a bug drug trade, as well as a pansexual party crowd run by enemy agents Joan and Tom Frost. Tom is played by Ian Holm, but Joan is Judy Davis again, and Bill is obviously drawn to her because she is a doppelganger for his deceased spouse. Tom telepathically informs Bill that he has been slowly killing off his Joan, as well, suggesting that they are one in the same, doubles of each other, two murderers.

My favorite joke on dual nature, however, is the tres gauche dandy Yves Clouquet (Julian Sands). Pronounced the first time we hear it as "Eve Cloaky," the name has many obvious double meanings. Eve evokes original sin, and Cloaky not only conjures the image of a cloak--something to hide behind, possibly while wielding a dagger--but of the Norse god of lies, Loki. Another great play on words comes when Bill types a sentence beginning with the phrase "I am very" and accidentally mistypes it as "I am vary." Yes, indeed, you are!

The story eventually doubles back on itself. The cure proves to be the sickness, and Bill must redress his actions against Joan, and the unconventional plot must have a conventional resolution, the hero rescuing the girl.

Or so it would seem. The journey of Naked Lunch is really Bill Lee seeking the most direct path to the subconscious. It’s that debate between Kerouac and Ginsberg (whom I should note are called Hank and Martin in the movie, I just refuse to pretend). "Exterminate all rational thought." What is the fastest way to get into the uncensored part of your imagination, the inner (Inter)zone. Bill has found that path, even if he is not fully aware of it. His reports have turned into the novel Naked Lunch, which he doesn't remember writing. Losing his drugs, losing his typewriter, accepting the illusion and no longer questioning, Bill needs to keep his grip on his dreamscape. His rescue of Joan from Benway (Roy Scheider) is not a magnanimous act. To stay on his writerly path, he must be in exile from others. Leaving Interzone for Annexia, a Soviet bloc with a name that indicates separateness, he must repeat again the heinous act that caused his initial banishment.

If then we are to accept that a big problem of Beat writing is the notion that just because it happened to the writer, he felt it was interesting enough to share, Cronenberg wouldn't necessarily disagree. For many, there is still an impenetrable veneer over the Naked Lunch movie, with the unexplained remaining unexplained presumably because it is inexplicable. Like hearing another person relate his or her dreams, even if the dreamer is Jack Kerouac, they are only of sufficient interest to the listener if they have some inside track that allows them to understand the dreamer's code. What Cronenberg is saying is that that this level of otherness is required in order for a writer like Burroughs to unleash his visions on the world, and while it may not all be clear, it doesn’t have to be. This makes his movie less of an adaptation than it is a translation, peeling back the layers of the typewriter to bury his hands in the meat, realigning the symbols to make a more accessible language.

Thus, through Cronenberg's eyes to mine, I understand it a bit more, I get what Burroughs was going for, even if I still don't like it. I'll keep the movie, the rest of you can have the book.

From the now-defunct "Can You Picture That?" column, September 21, 2004. It should be noted that I gave Cronenberg's recent picture, Eastern Promises high marks. Just for curiosity's sake.

I've never been much of a David Cronenberg fan. I've enjoyed his stuff on the periphery, with late '80s efforts like The Fly and Naked Lunch standing out as favorites amongst the bunch. For me, his fascination with breaking down the body and seeing how far he could go into abstract gore didn't resonate, and I often felt his visual fetishes overtook the storytelling. There was always something very cerebral about his work, but it tended to get lost in the blood and puke. The brain's products were less important than its tissue being exposed in a very literal sense.

Videodrome was a film of his I had never seen. Made in 1983, I had the impression that it, along with other earlier efforts like Scanners, were farther to the splatter end of things than was to my taste. When the Criterion Collection announced they were doing a two-disc set, it didn't inspire much of a reaction out of me; however, as I read about the movie as the release drew closer, I was intrigued. From the basic synopsis--James Woods plays a man running a small cable station turns to softcore porn and violence to compete, and eventually stumbles upon what is possibly a snuff version of reality TV--Videodrome sounded eerily prophetic. Was Cronenberg two decades ahead of the Fear Factor curve?

Upon viewing the film, I would have to say that yes, he was. Incredibly so.

Videodrome looks to be the flashpoint where modern horror truly began. With its use of stylized video images, it points the way to the media obsessions the genre would adopt in the new century. The poison video tape in The Ring, the bizarre mania of the zombies in 28 Days Later, the disjointed time and shifting visual approach of Ju-On: The Grudge (the Japanese in particular seem to really relish in Cronenberg's legacy)--the seeds for all these things were first planted in Videodrome.

Unfortunately, I'm not that impressed with the movie itself. Videodrome has its moments, but its ideas exceed its execution. The narrative feels disjointed, particularly at its climax, and Cronenberg tries to cheat his way out of explaining things by piling on the gore. We'll be so ooged out by the big vagina that has opened up in James Woods' stomach, we won't necessarily notice that the story doesn't always make sense or that the psychology is a little obvious.

Which can often work. Horror movie is about inspiring reactions, after all, and in its day, Videodrome may have scared the beejezus out of people. From watching the second disc's making-of documentary, Rick Baker's effects for the movie were certainly innovative for their day. Twenty-one years later, though, they no longer have the ability to maintain their sense of realism. Woods' malformations ooze and spit in ways that call too much attention to themselves, as, once again, the more ickiness Baker dumps out, the less obvious the fakeness is--the same trick Cronenberg uses. The neatest effect, the melding of man and TV fares better. I was able to ignore the fact that it was obviously a big balloon just because it was so damn cool.

Criterion has put together an amazing package, to my mind far exceeding what Videodrome deserves. The discs contain two commentaries, a recent short film by Cronenberg, various documentaries, collections of photos, and a vintage discussion on horror between John Landis, John Carpenter, and Cronenberg shot while Videodrome was in production. I can't imagine why anyone would want the unedited films that comprise the fictional Videodrome TV show, though. I would think you'd have to have a rather grisly brain malfunction to want to sit through their extended torture scenes.

The neatest feature, though, may be the package itself. It's designed to look like an old VHS tape--the Videodrome tape--including a paper slip cover and a spine made-up to resemble a handwritten label. It's a perfect melding of design and theme, keeping in the spirit of the film. There is also a 40-page booklet of photos, credits, and extensive essays.

I am sure fans of this sort of thing will appreciate it more than I, and Criterion once again sets the standard for how a movie should be treated (great sound, great picture, great extras), but in the end, for this viewer, Videodrome doesn't live up to its reputation.