Word: cronenberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...DAVID CRONENBERG'S $5-million opus, Scanners, now unreels. Cronenberg has long been one of the premier horror-film directors in the world. His earliest success--They Came From Within--updated George Romero's Night of the Living Dead by making the villains brown, turdshaped creatures who neatly slipped in any out of any available human orifice. In The Brood, his 1979 entry starring Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar. Cronenberg realized a brilliant and original idea. Doctor Reed develops a radical psychological treatment that enables his patients to manifest, physically, their traumas and neuroses. Eggar, his star warped patient, grows...
Scanners looks like big bucks, but it doesn't seem much like The Brood. Cronenberg admitted recently that Scanners is not especially deep and should be interpreted as his "fun entertainment picture." Where his previous films boldly advanced the language and style of the standard "scare 'em" thriller, Scanners retreats to cliche...
...Vale (Stephen Lack), a good scanner, is abducted by Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) so that he can be trained to search out and destroy Revok. Mutant takeover of the world is hardly an original idea, but the main plot pales when compared to the staggering number of inanities Cronenberg pours into the film...
Horror buffs rarely debate metaphysics; they want a director to deliver the chills-down-your-spine, heart-in-your-throat, you-can't-watch-but-you-daren't-leave goods. Cronenberg delivers. When the body of one of his characters turns on its owner, it does so with a sanguinary vengeance. In Scanners, the Force flings men against walls, drives them to shotgun suicide, creeps inside their muscles and works its way out. This last special effect is a gloss of the sequence in Altered States in which William Hurt's face and arms assumed grotesque simian...
...Cronenberg is a genuine writer-director-a man of vivid ideas and images. He can sculpt extravagant premises into scary narratives; he can clothe his plots in sinuous camera movements and dynamite film tricks. What he cannot do is write or direct convincing dialogue. Sophisticated actors tend to sound silly when they deliver his messages: in Scanners, Hero Stephen Lack is too hammy, Evil Genius Patrick McGoohan too wry. But pleas for Old Vic or New Hollywood performances miss the point. If Lack, McGoohan and Heroine Jennifer O'Neill act like mannequins in a punk boutique window, fine...