Scanners. David Cronenberg. 1981.

OK, now we’re onto the stretch of Cronenberg movies I intended to watch. This is the 2K remaster by Criterion of a movie I’ve only seen before on crappy third generation pirated VHS in the 80s.

I wonder what this “Janus Films” thing is. Does it have something to do with Criterion?

This looks very different from Cronenberg’s 70s movies (Shivers, Rabid, Fast Company, The Brood): It has the sheen of a high-budget commercial movie. I’m guessing most of the difference is the film stock, the camera operators and the lighting technicians.

Money used to count on that level when making movies.

I love this set!

Anyway!

Other than that, it’s very similar to those previous movies: It’s got the ponderous pacing, the characters explaining everything, the high concept.

The extras on the previous movies were interesting. Lots if interview with Cronenberg where he said things like “Playfulness is the main thing I do.”

I guess this is a playful movie, what with all the heads exploding and all… It’s about telepathic people (“Scanners”), which you’d thing would be less viscerally icky than most of Cronenberg’s concepts. But, no, Cronenberg’s kind of ESP make people throw up, die… or at least get nose bleeds. (Because the nose is connected to the brain so much.)

Does all of Cronenberg’s movies have a very talkative science/doctor type of guy? I think… yes? Shivers, Rabid and this one certainly do.

I’m not quite sure what Cronenberg was going for here. The line deliveries by the actors is totally stylised, as if this was Brecht in the 30s via a 50s American no-budget sci-fi movie.

Hm… I wonder… The protagonist in this movie (well both of them) look quite a bit like Cronenberg himself. Is that a thing with Cronenberg? I’m casting my bad memory towards the rest of his 80s and 90s movies, and all I see are tall, thin, dark-headed guys.

But I guess we’ll see as we’ll cover all his 80s movies… eventually…

This film is the only one of Cronenberg’s movies that has gotten sequels made, including Scanner Cop II.

A remake has been mooted:

In February 2007, Darren Lynn Bousman (director of Saw II, Saw III, and Saw IV) was announced as director of a remake of the film, to be released by The Weinstein Company and Dimension Films. David S. Goyer was assigned to script the film. The film was planned for release on October 17, 2008, but the date came and went without further announcements and all of the parties involved have since moved on to other projects.[19] In an interview with Bousman in 2013, he recalled that he would not make the film without Cronenberg’s approval, which was not granted.

Rabid. David Cronenberg. 1977.

Let’s do another Cronenberg! The Pakistani mangoes are in season and are so delicious so I made a batida de mango.

Uhm oh… I thought I had seen all Cronenberg films before, but perhaps I haven’t seen this one? I mean, there’s a lot of actors returning from Cronenberg’s previous movie, Shivers, so they all look familiar…

Yes indeed, this is a Cronenberg film. It’s his second commercially released movie, and it’s got all the Cronenberg tics, down to women undergoing radical experimental (and insane) operations.

It’s a strange movie. I mean, just the mechanics of the main vector of spreading the disease: There’s a woman that presses her… arm pits? to people’s bodies and her skin graft bites them. It’s not quite as scenic as vampires are. But I guess it’s a quite Cronenberg move: Arm pits are probably horrifying things for him?

It’s just very, very boring. It’s got the Cronenberg touches (EWW THE BODY), but there’s no tension and there’s nothing interesting going on and the actors are all pretty unremarkable and the cinematography is anything special at all.

I wonder whether George Romero was inspired by these movies for his next two Dead movies: Day of the Dead (I think) have some scenes that are very reminiscent of the tower block setup in Shivers, and Dawn of the Dead (if I remember correctly) has scenes that are very much like this movie. The main difference is that Cronenberg assumes that a sane, well-functioning government can exist, while Romero assumes that that’s impossible.

Shivers. David Cronenberg. 1975.

I long wanted to re-watch Cronenberg’s 80s movies, and I recently was made aware that all of them were available on 2K now, so I went shopping. I had not planned on doing his early movies at all: First of all, because I don’t want to watch Crimes of the Future again, and second of all: It’s not that many years since I watched Fast Company and The Brood just the other year.

I wanted to start with Scanners, but the Scanners bluray included Shivers and Rabid, so here we are.

I’ve seen Shivers at the Cinematheque like thirty years ago, and I remember it as being more than a little creepy. And not in a good way.

Well, OK, this is better than I remember. It’s similar to Crimes of the Future in some ways: It’s made very cheaply and the Montreal architecture is an important feature. And there’s the paedophilia thing. But he really leans into the things that would become the theme of his 80s movies: Disgust with the human body.

I mean, “Sex is the invention of a clever venereal disease”.

It’s a quite slow movie, and it’s surprisingly scary.

The 2K version looks and sounds great, which wasn’t the case before, apparently:

The film is so tackily written and directed, so darkly photographed and the sound so dimly recorded, that it’s difficult to stay with it.

The actors are pretty good. The weakest one is unfortunately the guy who plays the doctor (and is the lead): He’s constantly wearing and expression as if everything bemuses him and he know everything what’s going on… and it doesn’t, and he’s not supposed to.

At about two thirds through, it stops being scary, and instead it’s just one rape scene after another… played for laughs. It gets tedious.