Word: scanner
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...film has the world littered with 256 "scanners," people who telepathically link with another person's nervous system. Darryl Revok (Lawrence Dane), a bad scanner, tries to form an underground league of scanners who will overthrow the U.S. government and establish "a civilization that will be the envy of the world." Cameron 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...
Other tidbit wastes include Jennifer O'Neill's performance, given top billing in the credits. She enters the film about halfway through the picture as a good scanner. She spends the remaining 50 minutes hiding in corners and looking concerned. And those are her strong points...
Then there's Benjamin Pierce, another scanner, who has managed to keep his 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...
...headquarters of CONSEC-one of those multinational, virtually preternatural corporations that specialize in almost everything-where an unusual lecture-demonstration is about to take place. The subject: "scanners," people whose telepathic power enables them not only to read but to control another's mind, and destroy the body attached to it. The lecturer, a mousy older man whose head is the size, shape and texture of a bowling ball, has called for a volunteer to demonstrate the power. After a moment, a rugged fellow in his 30s agrees to participate. "Think of something specific and personal," says the lecturer...
Five years later, Hounsfield attacked the same puzzle for EMI, solved it in much the same way and applied it first to a prototype computerized head scanner, then to a body scanner, both of which EMI patented. These devices were able to distinguish soft tissues and organs and spot abnormalities by producing television images shaded according to the density of the tissue. Since then, widespread use of the scanner has drawn critics who argue that the machine's hefty price-up to $700,000 and more-drives up the cost of medical care at hospitals that could...