I know I originally said I would try not to make the entire 31 Days of Horror all David Cronenberg movies but well a lot of his movies are really damn good.
Max Renn (James Woods) is the president of CIVIC-TV in Toronto. Max is looking for a new show for his station which tends to play trashy violence and softcore porn. One day Harlan (Peter Dvorsky) who runs CIVIC-TV’s unauthorized satellite dish shows Max a pirate broadcast of TV show called Videodrome where people are just tortured and killed. Harlan thinks it comes from Malaysia but later discovers that it’s coming from Pittsburgh. Max thinks that this is the future of TV and starts airing it.
During a TV interview where Max defends his station’s programming while Professor Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley) preaches about TV being the future for real life, Max meets Nicki Brand (Debbie Harry) who he starts dating. He shows Nicki Videodrome and she runs off to audition for it.
Max starts having really bad hallucinations. In one his stomach evolves into a VHS opening that you can put tapes into. Max starts looking into Videodrome and has friends asking around about it. He goes to see Brian O’Blivion and meets his daughter Bianca O’Blivion (Sonja Smits) who runs a mission for her father (who it turns out has been dead for some time) called Cathode Ray Mission.
She gives Max a tape that her father made for Max to watch. In it O’Blivion explains that Videodrome was created to give viewers brain tumours which cause the hallucinations or the hallucinations cause the tumours. It’s all pretty weird and awesome.
Things starting getting pretty weird, gory and messed up. The movie is pretty good and the whole evil TV/reality show is still pretty timely today.
