Film Details:
Directed and written by David Cronenberg (eXistenz, The Dead Zone, Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch)
Starring
Stephen Lack (Dead Ringers)
Jennifer O'Neill (Rio Lobo)
Patrick McGoohan (Silver Streak, Braveheart, The Phantom, Treasure Planet)
Michael Ironside (Payback, Highlander 2, Free Willy, Total Recall, Top Gun, and a bizillion other things)
Review: by Melissa (e-mail your faithful reviewer)
I don't think I've ever seen a movie with such a wide gulf between the talents of the leads and the supporting cast.
And what makes it weirder is that the supporting cast is the half with the talent.
Scanners is something of a grab bag, though it's undeniably a classic of the genre, even with its flaws. The concept and plot are so good that it is easy to forgive some of the lamer elements of the film.
Scanners is an interesting horror/sci-fi twist on the double-agent brand of tale. The venerable Patrick McGoohan plays Dr. Ruth, a specialist who is trying to study and help the 237 known "scanners": people with astounding mind-control abilities. Just when Dr. Ruth is ready to go public with his findings, Michael Ironside marches in and starts blowing up people's heads. This is not a nice thing to do, but, hey, he's Michael Ironside. Dr. Ruth loses all of his test subjects and support to this upstart, and decides to send in his last hope, a newly-discovered scanner named Cameron (Stephen Lack) to infiltrate the underground movement led by Ironside. Zesty double-agent stuff follows, leading up to a worthwhile climax.
Stephen Lack and Jennifer O'Neill head up the cast, which is sad because they can't act worth a damn. If their dialogue sounded any more stilted, I would have sworn that I was standing in the middle of a Stilts R Us shop.
Not that the script helps them at all, either. For as good as the plot is, the dialogue is often painfully lame.
There are also some odd little plot holes (I'm dying to talk to the computer room guys near the end of the film: "Um, can't you just unplug the modem?").
And the score sucks. Even on the scale of 1980's era futuristic-synth-music scores (Vangelis, anyone?), the score sucks. I mean, the score sometimes sounds like a dozen half-sedated monkeys in a room with a Casiotone keyboard. (This fact is made even more entertaining that the score was written by none other than Howard Shore, who wrote the brilliant music for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Just goes to show you that everyone has to start somewhere -- Shore started scoring films with Cronenberg's Rabid, and has scored almost all of his films since.)
The editing and pacing could use some help, too. Cronenberg has always directed his films at a rather deliberate pace, which is something I consider quite admirable about his style, but Scanners is just uneven.
Yet, despite all that, Scanners really is a fun film because the things it does well are done very well. Patrick McGoohan makes up for the lack of talent in both Lack and O'Neill, and Michael Ironside just plain steals the show. I could watch Ironside sneer at a telephone book for two hours straight, and it would still be entertaining.
Plus, the gore effects are still quite good after all this time. (I hear that the exploding head was filled with dog food and rabbit livers! Yeah! Practical effects ROCK!) What is even better than that, though, is Cronenberg's great sense in how to use his effects. For a movie that was once rated X for violence and gore, today's movie viewers will find it remarkably restrained. Cronenberg only results to the visceral when he needs to, and when he does resort to gore, he does it with remarkable grace and creativity. If anyone could turn popped veins into high art, Cronenberg can.
In fact, it's a little sad to see that this film has lost a lot of its shock value in the twenty years since it was released. I would have loved to see it when it was fresh and new. Yet, even though it might have lost some of its punch, it is still worth tracking down for a viewing.
DVD Details:
