Review: VIDEODROME Part 1

Buy Videodrome - Criterion Collection
[Blu-ray] Videodrome (Criterion Collection)
Max Renn, essayed by James Woods, is the president of a cable TV station who is always on the hunt for the "next thing"; new, edgy, hardcore images to serve the public's taste. His rejection of a soft-core porn show titled "Samurai Dreams", complete with dildo masturbation scene, is testament to his programming philosophy. It is this determination to discover the "new" that catalyzes the action within David Cronenberg's Videodrome and sets in motion a chain of events that lead to Max's ultimate transformation into "the New Flesh".

Prophetic, bizarre, brilliant. These are just a few words chosen by cineastes to describe Videodrome's end product. Viewing Videodrome sparks questions many people are not prepared to answer. It is complex not so much in story structure as in it's intellectual proclivity to induce it's audience to philosophical self-pondering that produces many answers for a single question. Therefore, a simple synopsis is incapable of doing justice to the piece as a whole. Understand Videodrome is not "weird" just for the sake of being so. Videodrome is a wholly original nightmare of contemporary proportions and very deserving of its cult status.

Since the effect of analysis is useless without having seen the film, CINE AUTOPSIS here offers the first in a series of posts segmenting the entirety of Videodrome. Of course, all rights are reserved by the creators and CINE AUTOPSIS in no way, shape, or form claim authorship, ownership, or privilege. It is to be understood that CINE AUTOPSIS offers Videodrome in the spirit of arts education with the intent to expose the artist's work to an otherwise extant audience seeking to cultivate and nourish their appreciation of alternative cinema. It is my philosophy that exposure itself is education and this display is a simple case of public service.

Now, the first in ten segments of David Cronenberg's VIDEODROME.