You guys’ll have to forgive me. I’m not a “gamer” or “gamey” or whatever, so I don’t know how much of Dave Cronenberg’s video game exposee eXistenZ is 100% factual and how much is very, very slightly, almost imperceptibly exaggerated for dramatic purposes.
Maybe you can help me out: the “gamepod” controllers are little lumps of flesh, like mutated breasts. They plug a tentacle into a “bioport” on your spine, but if yours is installed wrong (which it turns out can happen if you let Willem Dafoe install yours at the gas station) it can overload your game pod and it will have to be repaired, which is a surgical procedure. The pods are actually genetically modified amphibians. (read the rest of this shit…)
It’s probly hard to imagine for people who grew up post-internet, but there was a time when you couldn’t just turn on your computer and find the weirdest, most fucked up shit imaginable just as quick as you can type www.theweirdestmostfuckedupshitimaginable.org. Back then people who had strange fetishes or possessed disturbing footage tried to hide that shit, they didn’t think they could proudly put it out there and try to make new friends with it. Finding that stuff took time, effort and connections. These days kids email each other real footage of hostages being beheaded. Back then the FACES OF DEATH guys had to fake a beheading, and even their fake version was more of a legend people heard about then something they’d actually seen. That’s when Dave Cronenberg’s VIDEODROME takes place. And it involves material way more unsettling than FACES OF DEATH. 
From the director of 
SCANNER COP (1994) is a predictably lame execution of a reasonably good concept. If we in fact lived in a world where telepathic “scanners” existed then it could be useful to society to have one on the police force. In this case it’s a kid whose scanner dad goes so crazy he grows 3 tiny little human heads on his forehead. I guess John Carl Buechler, who did the effects makeup, must’ve wished he was doing a Freddy movie. By this time the EPH-3 drug of 
SCANNERS 3 makes it clear that muthafuckas forgot about Cronenberg. Now it’s cheesy electric guitars, actresses who look like ’80s Playboy models and amateurish overacting that shifts in and out of different accents. The action kicks off with our hero scanner Alex Monet (named so because this is a great work of art, and played by Steve Parrish) brain-pushing his buddy as a party trick. But then somebody pats him on the shoulder, breaking his concentration and he fires his friend out the window, killing him. That sucks so he goes to find himself in Asia like Rambo III. 
Me on Jeremy Renner in my 
The Ain’t It Cool News has posted 
Of all David Cronenberg’s movies the one that lends itself the most to sequels is 
