Videodrome (1983)

 

Max Renn is the president of CIVIC-TV, a channel that specializes in provocative content, full of sexuality or violence.  He's always on the look-out for the next prurient sensation, and is not above some pretty shady business practices to get it.

Basically, in other words, Max is the cinematic embodiment of the "video nasty" boogeyman that conservative alarmists were in a fuss about in the early 80s - when they weren't in a fuss about Dungeons and Dragons or rock music, that is.

Anyway, things are pretty good for ol' Max.  He's just started a new sexual liaison with an attractive and kinky radio psychologist, and he's got a lead on that new sensation he has been looking for.  Videodrome is an ultra-low-budget pirate broadcast.  It's plotless, single-set sexual violence is just the edge that Max thinks CIVIC-TV needs in order to grow, so he immediately sets out to find the people behind it.

That search, however, turns out to be far stranger and more dangerous than Max could ever have imagined.

As I alluded to in my second paragraph, Videodrome definitely feels tapped into the early 80s zeitgeist, exploring many of the anxieties that plagued society's self-appointed moral guardians at the time.  You know the ones I mean: the type who believed that A Nightmare on Elm Street was surely a sign of the end times.  It's a somewhat risky idea, really.  I could easily see tackling such themes ending up in some kind of cringingly awful self-apologia.  Fortunately, this is a David Cronenberg film from what is probably his best period (from 79 to 86 he brought us The Brood, Scanners, The Dead Zone, this film and The Fly - quite the resume!).  It's a deftly made mix of sex, body horror and hallucinatory weirdness, and well worth a look if you're at all a horror fan.  Personally, I think it would work a treat in a double feature with either The Fly or John Carpenter's The Thing.