The title of this David Cronenberg sci-fi horror film refers to a group of people who have telekinetic powers that allow them to read minds and give them the ability to make other people's heads explode. The children of a group of women who took an experimental tranquilizer during their pregnancies, the scanners are now adults and have become outcasts from society. But Darryl (Michael Ironside) decides to create an army of scanners to take over the world. The only person who can stop him is his
brother Cameron (Stephen Lack), who wants to forget that he was ever a scanner. Winner of the International Fantasy Film Award at the 1983 Fantasporto Film Festival, Scanners was followed by a pair of sequels, neither of which involved Cronenberg. ~ Matthew Tobey, Rovi
Like Tod Browning, Cronenberg doesn't have the stylistic resources to match the forcefulness of his ideas, but his movies remain in the mind for the pull of their private obsessions.
All this should give fans of David Cronenberg's previous pix their money's worth, although lack of any rooting interest vitiates any possible suspense and highly elegant visual style works against much shock value.
Scanners is so lockstep that we are basically reduced to watching the special effects, which are good but curiously abstract, because we don't much care about the people they're happening around.
The quality of the film's inventiveness is not always of the first order, which is too bad because Mr. Cronenberg does seem to be a director-writer of some style.
Part conspiracy thriller, part political tract, it is Cronenberg's most coherent movie to date, drawing a dark (but bland) world in which corporate executives engineer human conception to produce ever more powerful mental samurai.
Scanners is David Cronenberg's classic sci-fi/horror film that put body horror on the map. There's little to be said about the movie, because if you're familiar with Cronenberg and his body of work, you already know he's interesting in society's excessive interest in sex and technology.
The bad news: The DVD transfer
is horrendous. There's a huge audio sync problem that becomes more and more prominent as the film progresses. I'm not sure if this is a fault of the source print, or what; but it doesn't do the movie justice. Hopefully some distributor will be able to fix this problem in the future, but it may not be possible.
Audio sync problems aside, Scanners is one of Cronenberg's most notable achievements. I give it a 95%. (He's still the king of gore.)
August 23, 2011
Austen Rudnick
Super Reviewer
The beginning of David Cronenberg's career makes the second half of Rob Zombie's career look like Quentin Tarantino's career.
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