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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.
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.
Though Videodrome finally grows grotesque and a little confused, it begins very well and sustains its cleverness for a long while.
Simultaneously sleazy and cerebral, it's a film whose surrealist setpieces burn a brand on the brain.
...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.
There's little denying that Cronenberg was way ahead of his time with much of Videodrome.
Long Live the New Flesh!!!
... Videodrome is as contemporary and relevant as ever.
[I]t stands out as one of Cronenberg's very best.
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.
Veers from being risible to sinister as it explores how viewers are brainwashed by TV.
Videodrome is arguably one of Cronenberg's best horror films, and it holds up brilliantly.
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.
The director captures the worst-case scenario of what might happen at the dawn of the video era, going all the way back to our parents' warning us not to sit too close to the television.
Underbaked, but you can't argue with its otherworldly aura. One disappointment: we don't get to see the belly-slit sex organs Baker designed for the never-used orgy finale.
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