Word: cronenberg
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Dates: during 1981-1981
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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...
...enough--a good little shock. Similar techniques were featured in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Brian De Palma's The Fury. The latter used the effect most spectacularly, with ten camera angles, when John Cassavettes turned to ripe tomatoes all over the dining room walls. But Cronenberg is a terrible director when it comes to shocks and thrills. He uses this effect once--at an anticlimactic moment, thus short-changing core fiends and shock jocks...
THAT'S THE PROBLEM. Cronenberg isn't a two-bit avaricious director; he's the best. And Scanners, an almost immediate sellout, must certainly be his worst film...
...sanity by expressing his scanner-related anxiety in his sculpture. The scenes at Pierce's exhibition and in his private studio are the film's most powerful moments. Expressionist figures contort and silently scream, communication more about the life of a scanner than the rest of the movie. Cronenberg understands that kind of horror. He can translate the internal and intangible into something real and terrifying...