Videodrome

CRITERION COLLECTION

WHEN VIDEODROME FIRST opened in 1983, a friend went to see it before I did, and called me immediately afterward.

"That," he said, "was the most fucked-up movie I have ever seen."

This was not a good thing. My friend liked his movies simple and straightforward, with lots of gore. Well, Videodrome certainly had the gore.

Looking back on Videodrome now, viewers might see all the old technology (VHS tapes, cable, big, clunky televisions) and find it quaint. But it was made in an era before the internet, TiVo, DVDs and digital camcorders. It was even made in an era before VCRs and cable were found in most households. Yet the ideas Cronenberg is playing with here are more relevant and striking today than they were then. Twenty years ago, it was just weird. Nowadays, it's a brilliant allegory.

Do I need to, or even dare, go into the plot? Well, James Woods plays the head of a small but sleazy cable network who's always on the prowl for more extreme shows. A video pirate hired by Woods comes across a mysterious snuff program called Videodrome while scanning international satellite transmissions. Woods tries to track the show down, gets involved with dangerously masochistic radio host Debbie Harry and, well, everything starts to go weird on him.

(It was only seeing it again recently that I realized how much Ringu lifted from Videodrome.)

On most every level, the movie is still amazing. The camera work, the pre-CGI special effects, the acting-and above all, the absolutely brilliant and warped imagination of David Cronenberg, given flesh here (of a sort). Little did he know that he was making a film about the world we're living in now. Many of the things that seemed "out there" in Videodrome are part of our lives now (though we don't have living TVs yet.)

The Criterion edition is, as ever, over the top. Here, though, it's not as exhausting as it sometimes can be. The package itself, designed (and convincingly) to look like a bootleg VHS tape, is a little too clever for its own good. But the two-disc set contains some extras that make it worth the hefty price. There's a new documentary about the special effects, some audio clips of Rick Baker talking about the project and the complete episodes of "Videodrome," which had been shown only in bits and pieces within the film. There are several commentary tracks, and a 20-minute round-table discussion filmed in 1981 with Cronenberg, John Carpenter and John Landis.

My favorite of the extras, though, is Camera, a strange and sad six-minute short starring Cronenberg regular Les Carlson, which, in its own ways, serves as a kind of afterword for the feature.

JIM KNIPFEL