Madeline
Once again, another 80s movie from Movie Crush has come on my radar. It is the highly sexualized movie full of hallucinations of sex and violence, Videodrome. I have heard the name. I know I have seen references to it in other media, but I’ve never seen it before. And now that I have seen it, I cannot unsee it.
Videodrome Plot
Max Renn, played by James Woods, runs a television channel that only shows content with sex and violence. The movie starts with him buying foreign content in some cheap, low rent apartment complex. In a few scenes later, he is looking for more content by having his technical guy, Harlan, finding scrambled sexual snuff videos. If this is not enough sex at this point, then this is where the movie really begins.
The first (and last) video Harlan finds during this movie is called Videodrome. From here the movie goes off the rails. It starts with harmless hallucinations of a sexualized television pulsating and begging him to do dirty things to it, which Max is okay with and seems to enjoy. Then the hallucinations get crazier and crazier. And during the hallucinations, Videodrome is further explained but the viewer doesn’t know what is real and what is just Max hallucinating.
Hallucinations of Sex and Violence
For anyone who is offended by sex or sexual violence, this is not the movie for you. The movie starts with light sex. A little boob and some implied sex. But this is only how the movie starts. It gets heavier and heavier as the movie progresses until it reaches heightened hallucinations of sex and violence.
After the light sex is cutting, then whipping, then rape, and before you know it there is murder. Tons and tons of murder. And because we are talking about hallucinations, the murders are not cut and dry. There is morphing and things coming out. And being the 80 movie it is, very clearly fake prosthetics and human organs, if you can call it that.
The first clear hallucination is Max’s chest opening up into what is clearly intended to be a vagina. This opening in his stomach reoccurs many times in the movie, swallowing up guns and videotapes and retrieving them later. When the gun is later retrieved it becomes a phallic extension of Max’s hand giving him a penus extension he can kill with.
Wait! What is Going On?
From what I’ve heard, David Cronenberg, the writer and director, made up a lot of the movie as he went. Which explains why I lost track of what was going on by the third or fourth hallucination. Half way through the movie it is explained what Videodrome is, how it came to be, and how it works. The problem is that they keep explaining what Videodrome is, it’s purpose, and the hallucination of sex and violence for the rest of the movie. Each time it is explained there is a new twist that causes the viewer not to know what is real and what is fiction… in the movie that is.
But the problem is that when half the movie is explaining what the purpose is, what is the point? On their first attempt to explain Videodrome, I lost interest in trying to follow what was going on. Then all the subsequent times, I just closed my ears and didn’t care to understand the plot. It was way too confusing neither these explanations nor the hallucinations of sex and violence held my interest for a minute.
Final Thoughts
My interest through this movie started a little above neutral. Quickly dropped below neutral. And not much longer after that dropped to “what is going on on my cell phone seems much more interesting.” Not a flop, just not my cup of tea.
