Videodrome (1983)
As the president of a trashy TV channel, Max Renn (James Woods) is desperate for new programming to attract viewers. But when he acquires a new kind of programming for his station, he begins to see his life and the future of media spin out of control in a very unusual fashion.
1920
1948
15 March 1943, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1 July 1945, Miami, Florida, USA
10 January 1948, Burlington, Ontario, Canada
24 February 1933, Mitchell, South Dakota, USA
8 September 1958, Ottawa Valley, Ontario, Canada
6 March 1926, Chicago, Illinois, USA
January 16, 2011
...an intriguing, deeply interesting film that over the course of almost three decades has acquired a prescient quality, but it's also schlock; a kind of cyberpunk rewrite of Network that indulges Cronenberg's taste for venereal horror.
October 30, 2008
... Videodrome is as contemporary and relevant as ever.
June 06, 2007
Never coherent and frequently pretentious, the film remains an audacious attempt to place obsessive personal images before a popular audience -- a kind of Kenneth Anger version of Star Wars.
June 06, 2007
David Cronenberg's most visionary and audacious film up to the time of its making, Videodrome is a fascinating rumination on humanity, technology, entertainment, sex, and politics that is virtually incomprehensible on first viewing.
August 30, 2004
Though Videodrome finally grows grotesque and a little confused, it begins very well and sustains its cleverness for a long while.
June 06, 2007
Film is dotted with video jargon and ideology which proves more fascinating than distancing. And Cronenberg amplifies the freaky situation with a series of stunning visual effects.
February 28, 2013
Here, Cronenberg is a provocateur only to a point - boldly striding past boundaries of comfort but getting the heebie-jeebies upon approaching true profundity. But he wasn't too far from figuring out which incisions could cut the deepest.
January 26, 2006
There are distinct signs of strain in the plot convolutions, not least in the spectator's loss of faith over indiscriminate and cheating use of hallucination; what certainly survives is Cronenberg's wholesale disgust with the world in general.
January 09, 2011
There's little denying that Cronenberg was way ahead of his time with much of Videodrome.
March 03, 2007
Veers from being risible to sinister as it explores how viewers are brainwashed by TV.
August 04, 2015
Simultaneously stupefying and boring, Videodrome is too extreme a blunder to survive exposure to a justifiably disillusioned horror-movie public.
June 19, 2008
[I]t stands out as one of Cronenberg's very best.
