In Videodrome, David Cronenberg throws a cathode-ray brick through the TV screen and invites you to climb in after it. Released in 1983, this slippery horror-techno-thriller is widely considered one of his seminal works—a sticky mix of body horror, media theory, and erotic hallucinations that’s been dissected in film schools and YouTube video essays like it’s the Rosetta Stone of techno-paranoia. And yet, despite its reputation and cult legacy, Videodrome is a film that feels less like a fully-formed masterpiece and more like an unedited fever dream scribbled on the back of a VCR manual after too many late-night viewings of Max Headroom and Faces of Death.
Let’s not kid ourselves—this is weird even by Cronenberg standards.
James Woods plays Max Renn, a sleazy TV executive who looks like he’s been awake since 1974 and smells vaguely of cigarettes and existential dread. He runs a low-budget UHF station called CIVIC-TV, where softcore porn and violent programming are the main attractions. In his quest to push the boundaries of taste (and FCC legality), he stumbles upon a mysterious pirate broadcast called “Videodrome,” a program consisting of nothing but torture, murder, and implied snuff. Naturally, Max is intrigued—not horrified, not concerned, just really eager to see if he can get the rights.
That’s the jumping-off point. From there, Videodrome spirals into a greasy whirlpool of hallucinations, conspiracies, pulsating TVs, and erotic self-mutilation. Max starts having visions—of guns merging with flesh, of people inserting videotapes into his stomach slit, of his TV breathing like it’s in heat. Deborah Harry (yes, Blondie) plays Nicki Brand, a radio therapist with a thing for pain, needles, and tongue-biting foreplay. She’s sexy, mysterious, and disappears from the movie faster than a signal lost to static.
What follows is a nonlinear descent into madness that feels like Cronenberg trying to tape over a Twilight Zone rerun with a pornographic philosophy lecture. There’s a shadowy tech cult, a media war for control of the human mind, and lots of moist, undulating prosthetics. And while all of that sounds like a recipe for a transcendent experience, Videodrome often feels like it’s being made up as it goes along. It’s a buffet of brilliant ideas, but the chef forgot to cook half the dishes.
Let’s start with the positives—because yes, there are many. The visuals are pure Cronenbergian nightmare fuel. Special effects guru Rick Baker delivers a buffet of body horror: VHS cassettes get fed into belly slits, handguns fuse with bone and muscle, and televisions become fleshy, seductive altars to neurosis. The practical effects are grotesque and mesmerizing—so tactile you can practically feel the Vaseline and latex through the screen. When Max pulls a bio-pistol from his own torso like he’s performing emergency surgery on a toaster oven, it’s iconic, disturbing, and exactly the kind of Cronenberg magic that makes horror nerds squeal.
And conceptually, Videodrome is ahead of its time. It’s about the convergence of technology and flesh, the warping of perception by media, the commodification of violence and desire. In 1983, Cronenberg was predicting everything from deepfakes to doomscrolling, virtual reality porn to news-as-weapon. The movie plays like Marshall McLuhan and William S. Burroughs threw up into a Betamax player. “The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye,” Max is told, and while that’s a killer line, it also sounds like something your college roommate would mutter right before falling face-first into a beanbag chair full of bongwater.
The problem is delivery.
While Videodrome is loaded with intellectual ammunition, it fires it all through a fog machine. The pacing is uneven. The characters drift in and out like dream fragments. Motivations are unclear. Max Renn isn’t so much a protagonist as he is a pinball—bouncing between hallucinations and conspiracies without much agency or clarity. We watch him descend into madness, but there’s no real arc—just static. James Woods, to his credit, sells the paranoia and sleaze with gusto, but you keep waiting for him to do something besides wince and poke at his own stomach like it’s a bad clam.
Deborah Harry, tragically underused, is introduced as this fascinating BDSM femme fatale and then vanishes into Videodrome’s fog like a punk rock fever dream. Her final fate? Maybe she’s dead. Maybe she’s on the other side of the signal. Maybe she got bored and booked a Blondie tour instead. The movie never tells us, because Videodrome isn’t interested in resolving much. It wants to provoke, not explain. Which is fine in theory—but after 90 minutes of Max staggering through greasy hallucinations and corporate backstabbing, you start to crave something resembling narrative traction.
It doesn’t help that the “villains” are cartoonishly vague. There’s a man named Barry Convex (yes, really), who looks like a Bond villain designed by David Lynch’s dentist. He’s part of a corporate conspiracy to use Videodrome to weed out the “weak-minded.” There’s also Professor Brian O’Blivion, a dead media guru who only communicates through pre-recorded video messages like a deranged Zoom host from beyond the grave. All of this sounds amazing. But none of it sticks. The ideas are thrown at the screen like spaghetti—some of it clings, but a lot of it just slithers down the wall and into the VCR.
By the time we get to the film’s infamous final sequence—Max hallucinating his own death, chanting “Long live the new flesh!” as he blows his brains out in front of a burning television—you’re not sure if you just witnessed a techno-spiritual revolution… or an overcooked art project with a killer marketing campaign.
Final Thoughts:
Videodrome is a film of astonishing visual audacity and intellectual ambition. It’s also a narrative mess. It asks fascinating questions about media, violence, and identity—but it buries them in gooey symbolism, abrupt pacing, and plotlines that evaporate like late-night static. Watching it is like being trapped inside a haunted television while someone flips through channels on PCP. At its best, it’s visionary. At its worst, it’s incoherent. Either way, it leaves a mark.
Rating: 3 out of 5 flesh-guns.
Come for the head-melting ideas, stay for the stomach-VCR and existential confusion. Long live the new flesh—but maybe bring a map next time.
