Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind.
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And Rob and I are out a few days this week, so we are bringing you some episodes from the vault. This episode of Weird House Cinema originally aired on January sixth, twenty twenty three, and it's our episode on David Cronenberg's Scanners.
Yeah, yeah, this is a great one. This is like one of the all time great weird movies of the twentieth century.
Let's start scanning right now.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick. And today's selection is the nineteen eighty one Canadian sci fi horror thriller Scanners, directed by David Cronenberg, a film that I first became aware of because it was much beloved by my dad when I
was young. I remember being a little kid, like I think, sort of hearing my dad needle my mom by being like, remember Scanners, And so long before I ever saw it, I knew the one thing that everybody knew about this movie which is that Scanners is a movie in which a guy's head explodes, which means Scanners is a certain type of film, and that type is the film that is apparently widely known for one thing that happens in it,
for one particularly shocking, horrifying, or otherwise uniquely salient scene or moment, whereas the rest of the film is much less known. I think this might be like the prime example of that. So, like, if you mentioned Scanners to most people, I think maybe the majority of people will be able to say, like, oh, yeah, and that the movie where a dude's head blows up, but not many
people will know anything else about it. I was trying to think of other examples of this, like the kind of movie that is mostly known for like one moment or scene in isolation, and people don't remember that much else. Multiple Ridley Scott movies come to mind. I am generally very intimately familiar with Alien because I've watched a bajillion times, but I think that's sort of one of them. It's a movie where a monster bursts out of a guy's chest at the dinner table, and maybe most people know
that but don't know anything else. Rachel suggested another Ridley Scott movie, Thelma and Louise. It is the movie where a car goes over a cliff.
Yeah, I don't think I've seen Thelma and Louise, but i've seen that scene, you know, Like that scene has been presented to me. Parodies of that scene have been presented, and therefore I feel like I know Thelma and Louise even.
Though I do not.
Yeah, a one that came to mind for me. A more recent example might be Gamo de Torres, The Shape of Water, the movie in which a woman and a fishman make love, albeit I think tastefully an off screen if I'm remembering correctly, or one of those two things. But that's a film where there's a lot more going on there, and I think it's a pretty solid picture. But that was the thing that was showing up in
late night monologues and so forth. In other ways, I think you might look at films like Basic Instinct and Bad Lieutenant that can come to mind for other reasons that people would call them out for, Oh, there's this one scene where something happens and in a backwards way
to channel another fishman movie. The promotional material for nineteen eighty Screamers, which was the US Corman re release of an Italian film Island of the Fishmen, tried to promote itself as the movie in which a man turns inside out, despite no such scene occurring in the motion picture.
That's a good idea. I can't think of another example. It'd be like if Scammer Scammers Scanners was known as the movie where Ahead explodes, but it didn't actually happen in the movie.
Yeah, that would that would be really really lame. Whereas in reality, I mean, they knew they had a great scene there. I was reading that originally that scene was going to happen first, but given the cinema and movie going culture of the time, they knew it's local people going to come in late. I guess they. But anyone who was watching films at the theater in nineteen eighty please tell me. I'm assuming there were fewer trailers, because
now you've got a solid half hour of trailers. But the concern was at the time, well, people are going to come in late, They're going to miss our key scene. We've got to offset it a bit with some other introductory material.
I mean, it is a really great scene. So anyway, I grew up hearing about this movie in the terms previously described. I saw it at some point after which I thought it was a cool, creepy thriller. I had, you know, modestly positive feelings about it. I also thought there were a few elements that didn't work so well, and they were some of the same elements that have been criticized by critics, especially when the movie initially came out.
But in the intervening years, I think critics who have looked back on Scanners have had a more robustly positive appraisal of it, and I found myself having exactly the same reaction. On my most recent rewatch, I gained a much more unqualified appreciation for it. I think Scanners is just just awesome, and some of the criticisms were the things about it I used to criticize. I now actually think our strengths. This movie is so much more than an exploding head.
Oh absolutely, And I was also surprised at how well it held up and how much I enjoyed it. In past viewings. I think I had that similar experience where I was like, well, there's a lot of great things going on here, but AB and C don't really work for me all that well. I think for the most part, my criticisms were somewhat dulled in my recent rewatch of the film, So it's going to be fun to get
into all that now. You were talking about your dad being a fan of it and talking about the exploding head and all I have to say for my part, before I even knew there was an exploding head scene in this movie, my earliest memories were of the box art at the VHS rentals store and the poster for it, which I think would have also been on the wall of the VHS Renold store, because this alone really freaked me out. Chef Kiss, Yeah, this is the one. You see this in a lot of the current materials for
the film. This is the one that shows Michael Ironside's character in just full rending, like straight limbed scanner mode, nearly like a full body representation, just completely scanning out. It's just absolutely terrifying. It represents some it's supposed to represent the way the character looks in the final showdown of the picture, which is an in and of itself, a horrifying sequence. I would say, more horrifying, maybe less shocking, but more horrifying than the head burst scene. This art,
I had to look it up. This is apparently poster art by Joe Anne Daley, who credited with some other really awesome VHS era posterrim box art stuff like creep Show, Popcorn, Prison. Prison's one that I never saw, but I remember distinctly this weird like skull prison looking VHS box art.
Oh yeah, she did something truly amazing here. So it is representing the scene where like the veins are popping out and all that, But there's also just there's an aura around Michael Ironside and the way that all of the textures of his skin and clothes and his hair or like they're like rising up off of him, as if he's literally sublimating, like his body is so hot it's turning into a gas.
Yeah, and there's this it's not even like a subtext to it because the poster art, some of the poster art and the lobby cards that I was pulling up for it, it has the taglines on it like ten seconds the pain begins, fifteen seconds you can't breathe, twenty seconds you explode. It's saying, look at this horrible vision of a man. This could happened to you watch this movie to find out why.
That's what happens when you combined pop rocks and PEPSI right.
Yeah, yeah. But at the same time, Yeah, this poster really does capture I think that a lot of the shocking imagery of that final Scanner show down, this vision of psychic power as this thing that kind of channels violently through you and will, if left unchecked, just completely destroy you in the process. Yeah, it reminds me a bit of the nineteen ninety film, which of course came out a decade later, Toby Hooper's Spontaneous Combustion that we talked about on the show.
Yeah, yeah, I see the similarity, though I have to say I think The Scanners is in a league above Spontaneous Combustion. But yes, I see what you're talking about.
Yeah, but both films do have a similarity and that they're both films where psychic powers of different types are dangerous to everyone that there. This is this wild, unchecked energy and also has potentially disastrous effects for the end of visual that is experiencing them. Yes, all right, Joe, what's your elevator pitch for this film?
All right, Cameron Vail can hear people's thoughts and it makes his life a living hell. He wanders the underground malls of Canada as a miserable outcast, until he meets a mysterious scientist who informs him that he is a Scanner and there are others like him. But instead of a community of brothers and sisters, Cameron discovers a secret war, and now the war has discovered him.
That's pretty good. Yeah, that a secret war is key to it, and that's I think one of the things that works so well about this film is there all these different layers of intrigue to it as you proceed through the picture.
Well, I would say, actually, the secret war is something that I really noticed on this viewing of it. It really stood out to me as a shared theme between Scanners and one of Uberg's other big movies, Videodrome, because if you think about it, both movies are about a naive protagonist who gets inadvertently swept up into an ongoing secret conflict between at least two existing factions or forces, which I'm not sure why, but that in itself is
just like a really exciting, almost intoxicating plot dynamic. It's specifically the thing about the fact that the conflict is ongoing and it's done by these powerful forces, but it's like invisible to all regular people. And so you know, Videodrome and the cathode ray mission are already out there.
They're plotting their campaigns against one another. But somehow the war has remained in the shadows, and suddenly the main character is made aware of it and sucked into it and is being played by one side against the other. And in the case of Scanners, the secret war is between an amoral arms manufacturer or arms manufacturing and security firm. That's concept. And then on the other hand, you have this murderous front of the Scanner underground.
Yeah, and I love how the players in this game in the secret warview will they're not nation states, they're not governmental agencies. There corporations and social movements and and and rogue organizations that again are just kind of all in the not even all in the underworld, like some of it is in a corporate boardroom, you know, that kind of setting. And I guess, I guess that does kind of match up with some overarching themes that you
see in media from the eighties. You see it in cyberpunk, you see it in various other pictures where it's yeah, we're in this this this realm, where it's it's corporations against corporation and and these other entities. I think Cronenberg and also William Gibson are both have both proven themselves with leears really good at also integrating these uh yeah, the social movements, artists and other things into these weird views of the future and of course of the present. Now.
I mentioned one of the taglines for the picture, actual taglines for the picture earlier, but here are just a few more. There's, of course, their thoughts can kill. That's kind of what the pictures about. Also, there are four billion people on Earth two hundred and thirty seven or scanners. I like that. That's kind of cherry picked from the screenplay. Yeah,
that's referring to a part in the film. They're kind of bending it a little bit, but it gives it that kind of provocative feeling that that works well with a tagline. Yeah.
I don't know if that's actually accurate to the script, because I think the number is two hundred and thirty six and that comes from the list of known scanners, the ones that are known to consect. But there are other ones that are not known to them.
Yeah, And also it's not just like this is the percentage of the human population that are just going to be scanners. We find out why there are scanners in
the picture. But the one that really stood out to me this time is you were about to experience the outer reaches of future Shock, and that of course that tagline is obviously invoking the nineteen seventy Toffler book Future Shock, and it's one that I hadn't run across before regarding this picture, But it really got me thinking about this film in a different light because Future Shock just remind everyone, and it was this concept that essentially you were dealing with,
or would be dealing with, a kind of trauma brought on by rapid advances and technology that would outstrip our ability to understand them or change with them. So don't think of it necessarily as some sort of like a movie future shock like a technology is advancing too quickly, and it made my head explode, but more of a of a like a cultural malaise even but I wonder if the scanner, the individual that is a scanner in this picture is in some ways kind of a physical
embodiment of this idea of future shock. They're changed, they're potentially dehumanized in the process of this change, and they run the risk of being less than them so and more of a conduit. In the film, by doing nothing, one man is almost reduced to a kind of zombie state, another becomes a monster, and two other characters we meet are able to channe all this change into creation and community. But it's like they're all dealing with it in different ways.
Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, I think about one reaction to if you take the concept of future shocks seriously, I think one of the most common reactions to it actually is a kind of disengagement or listlessness that comes from the fact that, like, if you can't understand the forces that are driving the world, it just kind of makes it feel like it's pointless to try to do anything or change anything because you don't understand how the machine works, so you know, why would you even try
to mess with it? And I see similar themes running around in scanners, like the idea that your agency can be removed when there are forces governing your life that you don't understand.
Yeah, absolutely, all right, let's go ahead and hear some trailer audio for this one. In this case, we're drawing on the actual radio spot, which is a lot of fun because everything is audio. This is the audio as it's intended. You were not supposed to glimpse an exploding head in this trailer.
Ten seconds the pain begins, and your flesh and your brain. Fifteen seconds you can't breathe, It chokes you, it destroys you. Twenty seconds you explode. Experience the terrifying power of scanners. Their thoughts can kill. Rated R restricted under seventeen might admit about parn.
I like this radio trailer too, because it again a very sonic experience that I think delivers on some of the just the excellent music and sound effects in this picture that help bring about this weird, creepy, psychic feeling.
The movie not only has good music, but I would say the sound design is really important in oh, I don't know, moments that feel less like music but more just kind of like the pulses and throbbing and drone sounds that occur when the scanning session is taking place.
Absolutely now, before we get into the plot, just if you're wondering, well, where can I watch scanners? Well, It's widely available. You can strain this one, purchase it, or rent it very many places, including as part of the Criterion collection. This one's the one's cemented in the collection, alongside the likes of Fiend Without a Face.
Ah, that's wonderful. I like when a film that was initially regarded by reviewers as trash or as just you know, some scummy bit of garbage it gets the Criterion stamp of approval.
Yeah. Yeah, because you look back on writings about Cronenberg during this time period and a lot of times that he's treated with a sense of danger. This is a dangerous weirdo they're letting make films and do we dare watch it ourselves? And to a large extent, I feel like we're past that, Like we've seen this full career by Cronenberg, a career that's still ongoing, and we have a more complete understanding of what his sensibilities are and
yet many of them are weird. But I guess there's less of a feeling of this is a dangerous man making dangerous films, and yet in Rewatching Scanners, I could definitely feel some of that, especially in the final showdown between our main Scanner characters. There was an unhinged, unsafe energy to it.
I mean, I love his films by and large, but yeah, it's hard to maintain that illusion of absolute danger after you've seen his scene in Jason X for one, and after you've seen his hair.
Yes, it's a marvelous head of hair. All right, let's talk about him a little more in depth. Yeah. David Cronenberg, the director and writer the picture, born nineteen forty three as of this recording, very much still alive and still making films, Thank goodness. Yeah, what can you say? Legendary Canadian master of the weird, profit of the New Flesh.
His first full length film was nineteen sixty nine Stereo, and from there he went on to direct nineteen seventies Crimes of the Future and a whole string of TV projects, before returning to the weird with nineteen seventy five Shivers, followed by nineteen seventy seven's Rabid and also the normy
nineteen seventy nine racing movie Fast Company. That's one I was actually at tempted to do on the show here because we've been kind of building up to actually doing a David Cronenberg film on a podcast series about weird films. It seems like it shouldn't have taken us two years to get here, but we had to pick the right one. And for a little bit there, I was thinking, well, we almost can't pick a regular Cronenberg film. We should just do Fast Company.
Yeah, there's a lot of I mean, like, I think we ten to toward movies that are a little bit like funnier or more fun to discuss, and a lot of Kronenberg movies are are really fascinating, but they're also like really downers. They're like really bummers in one way or another. I think Scanners is not quite that. So it's on it's on the lighter side of even as dark as it is, it's on the lighter side of the Kronenberg spectrum.
Yeah you would. I don't think you would ever described Scanners as fun, but compared to the larger filmography of Kronenberg, yeah, it's it's it's on the fun end of the spectrum. Anyway. After Fast Company, that's when he did a trio of films that kind of, I feel like, kind of set the tone for Cronenberg weirdness, The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome all three of those between nineteen seventy nine and nineteen eighty three. He followed these up with nineteen eighty three
Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone. He did one episode of Friday the Thirteenth, the series, nineteen eighty eight s Dead Ringers, nineteen ninety one's Naked Lunch, ninety threes, m Butterfly, nineteen ninety nine's Exhuits Distance, two thousand and two Spider, And from here he drifted more into I guess serious crime drama, violent crime drama for a spell there with two thousand and five's A History of Violence in Eastern Promises.
Then he did A Dangerous Method and then Cosmopolis. But at this point, oh, there's also a what a Map of the Stars I think is in there as well. But now he's back to his roots. He's returned to his roots with twenty twenty two's Crimes of the Future, which I'm doing to understand has no actual connection to the nineteen seventy film Crimes of the Future beyond the title.
But yeah, he's back working on weird films again. I mean not I guess they're all weird films, but certainly weird speculative films, and I believe his upcoming picture is going to be about Communion with the Dead.
M okay, which was I've never seen it, but as Existends the one that I've heard described as just a remake of Videodrome but with video games instead of TV.
Yeah, I think that's a pretty fair statement.
Now.
I haven't seen it, probably in twenty years, but I remember it having that kind of like, you know, creepy New Flesh vibe but with game cartridges and weird flesh guns and so forth.
I just bring that up because it's the video games of nineteen ninety nine, which I think has got to be like the funniest era of games ever, like the Nintendo sixty four PlayStation one kind of era, like those early three D games that if you look at any game from that era now, chances are it's going to be hilarious.
Yeah, unless you had a Cronenberg sixty four, now that that was a console, you took your cartridge and you just I shouldn't explain how it all worked anyway. Scanners is based on a couple of different psychic scripts that he apparently had gone in the late seventies. The Sensitives
and Telepathy two thousand. These were apparently both films he was going to pitch to Roger Corman and this whole thing, though, was rushed into production to take advantage of Canadian tax subsidies at the time, so he was apparently writing scenes for Scanners, oftentimes the morning before they would film later in the day, so it made for a rather demanding production overall. I think there may have also been some issues, as some conflict between some of the cast members, if
I'm to understand correctly. So I don't think it's necessary a film that Kronenberg himself looks back on as being like, you know, this great experience and maybe, I mean, if you're considering it being a film that was rushed, maybe you can see some of the rush in the resulting picture. But I don't know, it's still pretty solid.
I don't know. Yeah, I mean I would say that the writing is actually quite good.
I think, yeah, yeah, there's maybe one speculative leap that doesn't work so well, but we'll.
Get to them. I know exactly what you're talking about. We'll get there.
Yeah. But yeah, this film certainly made its mark, and not everyone understood it at the time. Some of the critics didn't get it, but it earned its place in cinematic history, certainly developed occult following and garnered what four sequels over the years, I think two proper Scanner sequels and then also two Scanner Cop films.
Yeah, I think I've seen all the sequels, and I don't really remember much about them, except that I think we had a really fun time watching a probably the second Scanner cop movie with like check dubbing.
Yeah. They and they keep, they keep threatening to remake Scanners, either either as a movie or a TV series, and I think it's never come together for one reason or another. I think at one point directors said they would do it if Cronenberg said it was all right, and Cronenberg said nuh, and so it didn't happen. They didn't give
it his blessing. So I don't know. It's one of those, like a lot of these things, Like, yes, if it had to be remade, I could imagine somebody could do it correctly and in a way that would would be a cool and insightful exploration of the world that is created in the original picture. But on the other hand, we don't really need it because the film works exceedingly well on its own.
Agreed. Now, I do want to mention one more thing about Cronenberg before we move on from him, which is recurring themes of Cronenberg movies. Of course, Cronenberg makes a lot of movies in the horror genre, and unlike the most common horror movie threat of straightforward danger to your life, right, that's what most movie monsters or bad guys, they're threatening
you with physical violence of some kind. The most common threat in Cronenberg movies, I would say, is not direct threats to your life, but threats to your self identity. He makes movies most often that are about a loss of the boundaries of the self or a change of the self into something monstrous, and a lot of these have a very kind of like squishy tactile quality to them, Like his movies are known for body horror, where there's some kind of disgusting change happening to your body and
you are becoming something alien. In the case of Scanners, I would say, the broader theme does hold, but it's less about the body and more a type of mental identity horror, like there are threats to the integrity of the mind or the soul.
Yeah, like it's it's not just uh oh, my Torso is now a VHS player, it's that added level of what does it mean that I am now a physical receptor for media? That sort of thing, like, yeah, it's it's always a more more thoughtful and intellectual exercise, but always weird. I do want to try some It's easy with someone like Cronenberg to get really you know, you start talking or thinking about it too much and they're like, yeah, man, it's just this is a metaphor for the way that
we think about ourselves and media. Like, yes, all of that is true, but also it's just really weird too.
Yes, undeniable. I mean. The other thing is like I didn't really mention this so much because it's hard to describe exactly what it is. But all of Cronenberg's movies that I've seen have in common this creepy, uneasy Canadian vibe. There's just something that's an energy that all of them
share that is difficult to put into words. It's sort of a type of coldness, a kind of observing of human human reaction with a bit of a distance that makes it a little more alien and a little more dangerous and a little more removed from mundane reality.
Yeah, yeah, I would agree, but it is hard to really nail down exactly what it is at times. All Right, getting into the cast here, and I have to mention one of the things I always love about Cronenberg films. The character names are always really interesting. And our first character here is the character Cameron Veil, but the actor
who plays Cameron Veil our main protagonist here. Also his real name also sounds like a Cronenberg movie name, Stephen Lack, So I might end up getting mixed up and referring to the character as Stephen Lack or to the actress Cameron Veil, because they both kind of come together.
For me here, I will deduct no points.
So Stephen Lack was born nineteen forty six Canadian actor, active from the mid nineteen seventies through around two thousand and two. This is probably his biggest role, though he also pops up in a small role in Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. He also wrote and starred in nineteen seventy seven's The Rubber Gun, directed by Alan Moyle, and another couple of films of note, in nineteen eighty's head On in nineteen eighty four's Perfect Strangers. Perfect Strangers being a Larry Cohen erotic.
Thriller, I had no idea there was such a thing.
If it could put butts seats, than Larry Cohen probably wrote it at least wrote a screenplay for it.
Perfect. So, regarding Stephen Lack and the character Cameron Vale, this is one place where I want to fully criticize and rebuke my own previous opinion about Scanners. I remember thinking in the past that a weak point in this movie was that the protagonist is sort of a cipher. He lacks defining individual characteristics and often seems to be operating without a sense of personal agency, you know, like you often don't quite know why he's doing what he's doing.
He's just sort of been launched into an action by the people around him, and he just follows through. Now, upon reviewing, I still think this assessment of the character is true, but I actually don't think it's a shortcoming of the movie at all. I think it is literally the point of the character. There are multiple scenes exploring the effects of telepithy on the development of personality. This
character is a is a scanner. He's a telepathic character, and the movie posits that if a person has the ability to read other people's thoughts and they have no power to control this ability or turn it off at will, it essentially prevents them from developing a personality or from
having individual thoughts. So in the world of Scanners, the sort of lost, wandering, untreated Scanner's mind is like living in a world where every single person in your vicinity is constantly, just incessantly screaming at you with a megaphone. And in such a world would you ever be able to develop a voice of your own. So I think the fact that Cameron Veil is sort of like an adult with the mind of a newborn, launched on missions he doesn't understand following through with them for reasons that
don't quite seem clear. You know, the things are going on without his agency, and he's just sort of like going along with the flow. It makes complete sense in my opinion. The arc of the movie is the character going from this state of undifferentiated mental cacophony and lack of agentic control over his own missions and behavior to the point of having a mind and purpose of his own.
I completely agree. Yeah, this is a performance that I think in the past I saw as a weak point I saw. I think I focus too much on the similarities between this performance this character and poor performances are poorly defined characters in various other B movies. But yeah, I think it totally works within the context of the
film here for all the reasons you point out. And also I have to to say, like, there are a lot of movies that feature what I think of is doll men or baby men, where you have some sort of reason for a person being like this, like maybe they're a clone, or they're an alien and human form from another world, and sometimes it just plays completely stupid on the screen and you just feel like you're watching a farce. But Veil doesn't really fall into this category,
at least for me. Like he's still molded by the world. He's not a complete babe in the woods, at least in many respects. We see him, with help become far more functional, so that there seem to be plenty of things about him that are unmolded. Of course, he's never developed a personality. His inner thoughts have just been the default networks and inner thoughts of those around him rather than his own, so he is he's almost like this robot.
But in a way that I don't know. Cronenberg is able to strike the right balance here, and of course credit to Lack too.
No, I know exactly what you're saying, Like he's the He's not the sort of pure doll man kind of creature you're talking about. This is a character who has faced a lifetime full of experience and hardship. So he's not without experience. He's had tons of experience, he's had tons of struggle, but he just hasn't really had a self throughout all of it.
Yeah yeah. And also it's never played up for comic relief either. Yeah yeah, he's never like, what is love doctor or anything like that, ignoring also the fact that it's doctor Ruth. But we'll get to doctor Ruth.
In a bit.
One more point on Stephen Lack, though, I have to say, great eyes on this actor. He has these just wonderful wide eyes that are just brimming with childlike innocence, but also the sense of absorption, that childlike absorption, like everything is being taken in by these wide eyes.
Yeah. Yeah, so I disagree with my former self. Thumbs up to the character and thumbs up to the performance by Lack.
All Right, that was our chief protagonist. Our chief antagonist is Darryl Revick, played by the wonderful Michael Ironside.
I would argue Michael Ironside is in the running for best film Heavies of all time. He emits fumes of menace. And it's not just his physical presence. I mean he does have a great villain or hinchman. Look, he's a great actor, and every line reading in this movie is like the tip of a box cutter being extended. It's just perfect, superb villainy.
Yeah, it's an intense performance that absolutely works with his character, who is again, this is a Scanner character, much like several different Scanner characters. But he is an extreme individual, so you need an extreme performance powering it. That's not to say that it's just always cranked up to ten. There are also plenty of scenes where it's a much more subtle performance. But when Ironside needs to crank it up, he can crank it up.
Like few others. I'll suck your mind dry.
Ironside was born in nineteen fifty Canadian character actor who's played just so many fantastic heavies and authority figures and mania over the years. His work goes all the way back to the mid seventies, but the Scanner seems to
have helped propel him into larger villain roles. He followed this one up with nineteen eighty one Surfacing, nineteen eighty two's Visiting Hours, and the fun sci fi romp Space Hunter Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, in which he plays an evil, snarling cyborg opposite Peter Strauss, Molly Ringwald and Ernie Hudson.
WHOA, yeah, it's a fun one.
We made.
That.
One's kind of on in my back pocket for some time when we're not sure what picture to view.
For weird House. It sounds wonderful.
He did a lot of TV work smaller pictures after that, but in the mid eighties he appeared in Top Gun. He was in nineteen eighty eight Watchers, the adaptation of the Dean Coot's novel with the Talking Dog.
He's in Highlander too, The Quickening. We can't forget that.
Yeah. Oh, and he's Richter in nineteen ninety's Total Recall. Gray's heavy role in that so good. And yeah, he's just continued to keep the tap flowing with villain in heavy row like this is an actor who has worked a lot and continues to work a lot. Two hundred and seventy one credits on IMDb as of right now.
See he's done a lot of TV tales in the crypt the nineties Outer Limits Canada's Danger Bay that I watched as a kid, And there's also a film by the name of Neon City from nineteen ninety one that I have not seen, but I know has been recommended to us by viewers rather listeners. You're not viewing those, you're listening to it, all right. Another Scanner character in the picture is Kim Obrist. It's another nice Cronenberg character name played by Jennifer O'Neill born nineteen forty eight.
I'd say another great performance. Jennifer O'Neil is excellent in this role and her character is a very interesting one in contraposition to the other sort of powers in the movie. This character emerges essentially when Cameron Vale discovers a third faction.
So you got the powers of Concept, the Evil Corporation and reVC Scanner Army, and they're going at it against each other, and of course Revic wants to control Scanners as like an army to sort of dominate the weaker non Scanner human beings consect wants to control an individual Scanner's power to use them as a weapon for the highest bidder, and these are portrayed as potential like lone
wolf psychic assassins. And in contrast to the sort of like individual will to power of these other two factions going at each other, kim Oprist seems to be starting what looks almost like a Scanner religion or something where one where the Scanners deliberately sort of reject individuality and commune with one another, and they host rituals where they
fully inhabit one another's minds. In these group circle rituals, they even form a sort of like a shared collective consciousness and they're there's a haunting scene where they're doing this. They're fully mind melding in a circle. They keep talking about like, you know, lose yourself, it is power, you
know what do they say? Like it is terrifying, it is beautiful or something, And then Revick's assassins bust in and start shooting them and some of them are killed and in the escape after the scene, Jennifer O'Neil's character turns to Cameron and says, now, I know what it feels like to die.
Yeah, it's a great performance, and I do love as well how this is is presented. It's this sort of third option in the scanner change that's occurring in the world, Like what if we didn't approach this as a as a method of violence, or what if we didn't approach this as like a security threat but an opportunity as a way of coming together.
But I do think that's the case. But also I like that Kim Oberst's community is not presented as just purely wholly like good and wholesome, Like there's something kind of freaky about their you know, the scene where they're all communing with each like they are clearly being entranced by something, some other level of consciousness they're achieving by linking their minds together in that way. And while they're not they don't have overtly violent intentions that we see
in the movie. There's a sense of like, we don't know what this is becoming. This could just could be some other thing that could be great or could be awful.
Yeah, there's potential dangerous opportunity here, and we get a sense of that too when they kind of fight back and catch the assassin's on fire. Like there's a sense, or at least the sense I got from it, was that this was not an individual movement, but this was maybe like a reflex of the collective consciousness that they were summoning between their collective minds. Yes, and the performance
is pretty solid too. Yeah. This Jennifer O'Neil Brazilian born actor and former model who had quite an acting career in the sixties and seventies. Especially. She was in Howard Hawk's last film, Real Lobo in nineteen seventy. She worked with such directors as Robert Mulligan, Auto Primager Edwards, and Jay Lee Thompson, and she was the titular character in Luccio Fulci's The Psychic from nineteen seventy seven.
Oh. Interesting, a little bit of overlap there.
Yeah. So I don't know if they were like, we need a psychic for this picture, and they're like, well, I just saw this great Italian movie. Well let's get Jenmfifer O'Neil. All right, we've mentioned the scientist that leads our protagonist into well, it gives him a sense of himself back, but also then gives him a spy mission. This is doctor Paul Ruth. So yes, the character is Doctor Ruth played by Patrick McGowan who lived nineteen twenty eight through two thousand and nine.
Another great performance. I mean again, the cast is just great all around. I think McGowan always brings kind of interesting and unexpected take to his roles. I think one great example of this, which is a movie that I overall do not like. I am not a fan of Mel Gibson's Brave Heart for multiple reasons, but I have always found McGoo win's acting choices as the villain in that movie he's played. He plays King Abard the first
you know, the long shanks, uh. He plays him as this absurdly psychotic villain, but in a really irresistible kind of way, chewing the scenery but with this odd, bemused, high pitched voice.
Yeah yeah. And in this picture as the as the Doctor Paul Ruth, he has this kind of there's the kind of shiftiness to him, you know, like we often see him looking away or looking down at the floor, not making eye contact with the with the characters that he's interacting with. That it creates an interesting energy. It's We've seen similar characters of this type and plenty of other films, you know, the he's sort of in the
Mad Scientist mold. He's also in this kind of you know, teacher and savior mode, or it seems to be for a large portion of the film. But but he has a he has a different energy.
I love the moral ambiguity of this character. Like is this character a good guy or a bad guy? I mean he's clearly some of both, and not just transitioning from one to the other, like he's both in an ongoing capacity.
Yeah. So Magowan, I don't know. He might have been the biggest name in the film at the time, and maybe even so in retrospect. An American born Irish actor, probably best remembered as the Prisoner on the late sixties TV show, but he was also in a successful Danger Man from the early sixties. He was in seventy nine's Escape from Alcatraz, ninety five's Brave Heart, ninety six is a Time to Kill, and one of his final credits was a voice actor in two thousand and two's Treasure Planet.
I've never seen Danger Man, but that's a funny name.
Yeah, you know, early sixties spy TV show. I think I may have watched an episode of it back in the day.
Do they have gadgets?
I don't know if this was gadget era. You know, this might have been too soon, But then the prisoner certainly leaves an impression that suitably weird late sixties show that some of the other bit players are also pretty fun. Robert Silverman plays Benjamin Pierce, a sculptor, a scanner sculptor that we meet in the film Born nineteen forty three. Kind of a weird Canadian character actor whose work lines up with a couple of folks already mentioned, especially Cronenberg.
He pops up in Rabid the Brood, Friday the Thirteenth, the series Naked Lunch Existence, and Jason X, which of course Cronenberg did not direct, but Cronenberg acts in as one of the mad scientists that initially resurrects Jason Vorhees.
I think he gets like a spear thrown through his torso.
Yeah. Robert Silverman's also in head On, which we referenced earlier, and he's in ninety five's water World.
Oh don't remember him in that, but he's great in this. He's good in his Cronenberg roles in I think in both of his Cronenberg movies that I've seen. He plays like a character who had some kind of bad interaction with the villain that the protagonist is seeking out, and the protagonist tests to track him down.
Yeah s, yeah, we also have a villain by the name of Braden Keller. This is a This is like a Hinchman character played by Lawrence Dane, who lived nineteen thirty seven through two thousand and two. Canadian character actor who is in a ton of things including Happy Birthday to Me from nineteen eighty one, Heavenly Bodies from nineteen eighty four, Bride of Chucky from ninety eight, Head On
dart Man two, and much more. He did a lot of TV work in the sixties and seventies, and being a Canadian actor, of course, he was on nineties Outer Limits. He also pops up on Danger Bay and a show called Seeing Things that I'll describe it just a second.
He's a good villain. He's sort of a suit villain as opposed to whatever Michael Ironside is. I would say if Michael Ironside's character is the Clearance Bodicker of this movie, Lawrence Dane plays the Dick Jones of the movie.
Yeah, yeah, Ironside his anti establishmenter, so it seems, and Dane is establishment for sure. There is a character that is just credited as First Scanner. This is the kind of frank oz looking guy whose head explodes in that famous scene from Scanners. This character is played by Louis
del Grande born nineteen forty three. And I think I've mentioned del Grande on the show before due to his various connections, but Canadian actor who is mostly known to me that I saw him well before I saw Scanners, because he was on a series on CBC titled Seeing Things that ran from nineteen eighty one through nineteen eighty seven, and I think he was also one of the creators
of the show. But it's kind of a lighthearted psychic detective show where he he's always having visions, he's seeing things with his psychic abilities, and in doing so, he helps to solve the crime in the episode of the week.
I would watch that. I like his vibe. He's only got a very short scene in the movie, but he's quite memorable in it, and not just for what happens to a plaster cast of his head.
Yeah, he gets to address the audience and yeah, yeah, It's a nice little performance, bit part, but very memorable. He's done a lot of work over the years, especially in Canada. I do. Credits include Happy Birthday to Me of unknown origin from nineteen eighty three, the nineties Outer Limits, Goosebumps and Les, and a couple of behind the scenes credits here. Howard Shore did the score for this movie.
So score by Shore born nineteen forty six. Howard Shores, of course a Canadian composer and conductor who's worked extensively in film. He's probably best known for his work on the Lord of the Rings movies for Peter Jackson. He won an Oscar for at least one of those, and he's also scored all but one of Cronenberg's films since nineteen seventy nine. I believe The Dead Zone is the
exception in that list. Not only did he write the score to Cronenberg's The Fly, but he also wrote an opera based on the film in two thousand and eight.
But wow, that's something.
Yeah, I've never seen it, but I remember seeing stills from it when this was first making the news, and I was like, Oh, this looks amazing. This is the opera for me?
Would it be the gooeyest opera ever. I don't know. Actually, some classic operas get quite bloody.
Yeah, but you can't have people slipping in the slime, so there's only so much you can It looks like they had a pretty cool functional brundle fly costume for it, because you get into unique challenges for a stage performance like that. Anyway, as far as Howard Shore's score for Scanners goes, I really liked it. I listened to it in isolation prior to rewatching the film, and it has this kind of boisterous main theme that kind of sounds
like Hall of the Mountain King. But in general it has a lot of these sort of creepy, kind of late seventies early eighties vibes that I guess are also this is probably Cronenberg energy as well, since you can't really divorce Kroneberg's films from shores music all that much. But outside of the more traditional sounding stretches the score, there's a lot of weird electronic warbly bits and drone stretches that I absolutely love so and also some percussive chaotic segments as well.
Even a lot of the traditional instrumentation sounds unusual, like there are these moments of just sort of descending dissonant horns.
Yeah, yeah, so it's really good stuff. This is definitely this is a score that's worth listening to as an album in my opinion. And before we move on, yeah, let's go ahead and just hear a sample from the score. This is just a taste of main title and public scan. And finally, Dick Smith has credits on this film. Special makeup effects consultant Dick Smith lived nineteen twenty two through
twenty fourteen. Just one of many special effects pros on the motion picture, but he's often singled out as playing a key role in the opening head explosion, well it's not opening, but you know, early head explosion in the film, and the final showdown. He's a special effects makeup legend who worked on such pictures as The Godfather, The Exorcist, Taxi Driver, and Death Becomes Her. He won an Oscar
for his work on Amadeus. Other notable films include Altered States, seventy two episodes of the TV horror anthology Monsters, Tales from the Dark Side, The Movie Starman, Oh, and This One's Pretty Fun. Nineteen fifty seven's The alligator people.
Ah, well, I hear the dogs choke on their barking when they see alligator persons in the bog and fog.
Yeah, the very same. All right, well, let's get into the plot for this film. Let's head to the mall.
It does start in a mall, doesn't it. But it can't be just any mall. It's a really creepy mall, it really is. I don't know if Cronenberg picked it because it was an especially creepy looking mall, or if all malls in Canada were this creepy at the time. I don't know. How would you describe this mall?
Oh? I mean it's yeah. I didn't look up where they filmed this. It seems like there were some great locations scouting in this picture. It's kind of a splendid scarlet sanctuary of a mall, but at the same time, not in a way that feels manufactured, like there's a scarlet sanctuary feel to some of the settings in Dead Ringers, for example, there's very much intentional and very much works
in that movie. This feels like maybe they just found this really weird crimson augmented mall environment in Canada and it's just oh, it's great. It's one of these where I was just taking in all the little like I wanted to deposit and see what the stores were in the background, you know, part of it being sort of the cultural archaeology of watching anything set in a mall from the eighties.
Totally, but also I would emphasize that it feels like it's underground. I did not detect any hint of natural light whatsoever. And the ceilings are lined with just rows and rows of light bulbs projecting down from the ceiling.
Yeah. Yeah, it's absolutely splendid. And there's so many look like, there was this one scene where our protagonist pauses in front of a poster for hot Pogos and it shows like a cartoon of a kid holding a corn dog, and I was like, what is what's going on here? Is our hot corn dogs called hot pogos in Canada.
I just never realized it. Well, I looked it up and according to Wikipedia, in Quebec and Ontario, a battered hot dog on a stick is called a and is traditionally eaten with ordinary yellow mustard, which is a solid choice. I think yellow mustard is your best condiment for any
corn dog. Experience, at least if you're eating a real corn dog, and a real corn dog, in my opinion, should either be a fake hot dog at the center, you know, like a soy dog or something, or if you do eat meat, it should be a meat hot dog that is on the verge of being fake meat, you know, like it's so processed that the difference between it and a soy dog is just negligible.
Yeah, but either way, mustard. You gotta have mustard.
Yeah, gotta get that yellow mustard out for your pogo. So Canadian listeners, I was not aware, but I like it. It sounds more fun in some respects than corn dog pogo. I might go for the hot pogo next time.
Well, here is where we meet our protagonist, Cameron Vail. He is wandering the food court of this subterranean underworld mal snagging people's leftovers, and he looks shoveled. He's wearing kind of a dirty trench coat. He's being presented as a sort of disoriented, skulking outsider, and he's just grabbing people's leftover POGs and stuffing them in his mouth. But unfortunately, he catches the attention of a couple of ladies at a nearby table, and we begin to hear them speaking.
They're they're saying things like, oh, I've never seen anything so disgusting in my entire life. We're being stared at. They let creatures like that in here. It's just awful. But wait a second, like, are their lips actually moving while they're saying these things? That's not so clear. And Cameron Vale here he I guess we don't know his name yet, but this characters he's bothered by their talking.
We see it appearing to cause him almost physical pain, and so he turns his attention to these these two ladies, and the one of them who seemed to be speaking, though maybe her lips weren't moving, starts to have something that looks like a migraine, which evolves into something that looks like a seizure, and she's collapsing on the floor.
People are trying to help her, but this interaction gets the attention of a couple of tough looking dudes nearby, and they chase Cameron and immobilize him with a dart gun.
Yeah, there's a fun action sequence where he tries to get away from him by jumping from one escalator to the next. And it looked looked kind of dangerous. I was like, I was like, ah, don't don't get caught between them escalator and the ceiling sort of situation. But he manages to make it over, but then succumbs to the tranquilizer dart.
Yeah, he collapses on the escalator and I had the same reaction. I was like, oh, no, don't let your shirt collar get caught in the Oh yeah, but anyway, Yeah, So he wakes up later strapped to a hospital bed in a large room where he is confronted by doctor Paul Ruth Patrick McGowan, who gives him kind of a speech. He you know, he says, Cameron, why are you such a derelict? They've never met before, but he's introducing himself and he says he can tell him why he's a derelict.
He says, you're a scanner and that has been the source of all your agony, but I will show you now that it can be a source of great power. And from here dozens of people begin to walk into the room. Doctor Ruth just has them come in and sit in these rows and rows of chairs, and the more people pour into the room, the more Cameron is in distress. We hear all of their internal monologues at once, has a kind of great ocean of voices. And this is torture for Cameron, you see, he's like writhing in
pain at hearing all of their voices at once. But eventually doctor Ruth provides the cure. He gives Cameron an injection of a drug called ephimarole, and it makes the voices stop, and Cameron has relief. Almost he has relief, as if for the first time in his life. Now next comes the most famous scene in the movie, the demonstration.
So we see that we're at the headquarters of a corporation called CONSAC, and there's a demonstration being held for a private audience in an auditorium, and we meet a sort of timid, bookish man in a suit in glasses on stage. This is Louis del Grande or del Grande. I don't know how you pronounce his name.
Yeah, I've been saying del Grande, but you know, it's just that's because it's such a big performance, you know, it's a con.
And so this guy begins by giving a speech. He says, I would like to scan all of you in this room, one at a time, I must remind you that the scanning experience is usually a painful one, sometimes resulting in nosebleeds, earaches, stomach cramps, nausea, sometimes other symptoms of a similar nature.
But he assures them there is a doctor present. He points out the doctor Gatineau, and he asks that no one leave the room once the demonstration has begun, and he calls for volunteers, and of course there's a long, awkward silence because I don't know who knows what's sanning is, who wants to be scanned. But finally, a bored looking man in one of the back rows raises his hand and comes to the stage and why it is Michael Ironside.
What do you know?
And it's not just Michael Ironside. He has an interesting ring shaped scar above the bridge of his nose.
Yeah, I wonder what that is. Perhaps we'll find out later.
So the scanner doing the demonstration asks Michael Ironside to think of something that the scanner would have no way of knowing, something that will not breach the security of his organization, maybe a personal detail from his life. And Michael Ironside says, all right, I have something in mind, And when you watch the scene knowing what's coming. You can see little sinister flourishes, like little smirks and flares of delivery from Michael Ironside as he's getting ready for
this thing. They kind of go by you the first time. For example, Michael Ironside asks the scanner if he has to close his eyes, and sanner assures him that it doesn't matter, and scanning begins. Both men start by getting very intense looks on their faces, like they're very focused, maybe perhaps both struggling, maybe perhaps both in a little bit of pain. And because we don't know what we're looking at, you could just assume this is what it
looks like when the scanner demonstrator reads somebody's mind. But this just escalates and things look weirder and weirder. Eventually it really starts to seem like something might be wrong, like are they supposed to look like they're in this much distress? And there is an awesome, painful, droning sound in the musical score. I feel like, actually, just in a recent movie, I was like, do not include painful noises in the score of your movie. I take it back,
this is why you should have it in Scanners. I was completely wrong, and then suddenly, without warning, the demonstrator's head explodes, And I can see exactly why even people who haven't seen the movie or don't remember anything else about the movie, will remember this scene for the rest of their lives. It is one of the most shocking, disgusting, unexpected, unbelievable moments I can think of in any movie. Ever. I would go so far as to describe the scene
as an almost awe inspiring act of filmmaking. Like, yes, it is gory and gross, and so part of its effect is like pure vulgar exploitation of our squeamishness, but it's also a masterful exercise in like building uneasiness and this sense of uncertainty and suspense and then relieving that tension with a spectacle that is so nasty it leaves people absolutely speechless.
Yeah, you can even knowing what's coming. And again you don't even have to have seen the film because to know what's coming, because the moment of the explosion has just been reproduced. It's become a meme. You can find it all over the place. It's a gift for of you know, on various formats and on discord and so forth.
But when it hits in the film, Yeah, there is that feeling of release that built up pressure and like literal psychic pressure inside this character's head, and then the reaction to from all the characters that are present is pretty amazing. Like even iron size character Reva is I don't know that you would say he's horrified, but there is a sense that he is perhaps a little shocked at how how gross the results were or how powerful his attack.
Was, Like he kind of looks down at the exploded head going like, oh, yeah, I know, I've read stuff about how this special effect was accomplished, Like I think they tried it several different ways and thought it didn't look right, and they eventually landed on the way that ended up in the final movie, which involved a shotgun.
Yeah, which is not surprising given how many shotguns are in this picture. I was really, this is one of the things I'm this viewing that I was kind of commenting to myself. I was like, Wow, lots of shotguns in this picture. This picture has a thing for shotguns. So yeah, a shotgun was apparently used, a shotgun loaded with salt. I believe I used a latex head filled with I believe dog food, leftovers, fake blood, rabbit livers,
all sorts of gross stuff. And I think one of the challenges apparently was they wanted it to explode, but they couldn't have it explode with sparks. They wanted it to feel very organic, at least in this one instance of psychic energy, and the picture like the ideas that like this is it's not fire, it's not electricity per se. It is some sort of almost organic process that's taking place here.
Yeah, so it's disgusting, but also I mean, I just want to emphasize again, how if you haven't seen it before and you don't know it's coming. I don't know if that's possible for anybody, because you know, everybody knows that about this movie, But if you didn't actually know what was coming going in, it would be so shocking and leave you absolutely baffled. And I love that, you know, the audience is just as baffled as like the characters
in the room are. But then there's this moment of focus where people start turning to Michael Ironside and it's like did he somehow do that? Like did the scanner get scanned? And so Michael Ironside's character is apprehended by the Consect security guards. The head of security instructs the staff doctor to give Michael Ironside a shot of ephemarole, which, hmm, that's the same stuff that doctor Ruth gave to Cameron Vail to quiet the voices earlier. And we later find
out that ephemarole is a scan suppressant. It is a drug that essentially turns off a person's scanner abilities. So they're giving the shot to this guy to disable him. But for some reason, the doctor when he goes to give the shot to Michael iron Side, Oh, it's like he can't quite line it upright. It's something's going on in his head, and he accidentally gives the shot to himself instead of Michael Ironside's hand.
And in this we're seeing the more subtle powers of the of the scanner. Here, he's able to easily manipulate and puppet those around him into doing things they don't intend to do.
Right, So, while the concept Kagoons are transporting Michael Ironside to another location by car, they get overwhelmed. They strangely start wrecking their own cars and turning their guns on themselves, while the prisoner just looks on smiling and well after that time for a corporate leadership, meaning and what do you know the scientists who earlier apprehended Cameron Vail, this doctor Ruth. He is there at the table with the
with the CEO of Conseack. So the big boss, Trevellian says, in a line that I found so funny I wrote it down. He says, last night we at Consect chose to reveal to the out side world our work with those telepathic curiosities known as scanners. The result six corpses and a substantial loss of credibility for our organization. I don't know why I keep wanting to compare this to RoboCop, which I guess came later, but the RoboCop meeting with the ED two nine when he's like it's just a glitch.
Yeah, well, I mean I think the Clamp character in Grim Ones twos as a very similar line where it's like, like the grim Ones have been rampaging and he's like, like people could actually get killed. You know, that's what's going to do for the company, What that's going to do for our stock value?
Well, so, anyway, in this scene which I thought was a very interesting and well written scene in the way it kind of unfurls the scenario of the movie. We learned that the company has a new director of internal security. Michael Ironside made the previous one shoot himself in the street, so they've got a new guy named Braden Keller, and Keller recommends that the company discontinue its scanner program at once. He says, our company is supposed to specialized in weapons
and private armies, not fantasies. And doctor Ruth replies that, hey, the fact that six of their people were killed and the company was embarrassed in front of industry heads by a lone assassin using only scanning techniques in itself proves that scanners have immense potential as weapons, so we got to keep developing them as weapons. But Keller replies coming back saying, but hey, how many scanners do we have
working with us right now? Ruth says, as of last night, none, So apparently they had one guy cooperating, and that was Louis del Grande, the demonstrator. He was their one scanner on the payroll, and Michael Ironside blew up his head, so they have none now. But then Ruth says, Consect Surveillance has gradually lost contact with all the names of scanners on our list, and I submit, this is not an accident. I think we've lost them to a program far in advance of ours. Ooh, and that's a good moment,
he says. From my study of the situation, I've come to the conclusion that there is a scanner underground developed in North America. And Keller, you know, he's not buying this. He says, that's ridiculous. You can't get two scanners to sit in the same room together without going berserk. They can't stand being around one another. But nevertheless, Ruth says, nope, they're working together. And the underground has a leader. In fact, he's probably the man we met the night before, and
his name is Darryl Revick. So he's got a solution. Either we let Daryl Revick just strike at us without retaliation, or we infiltrate his organization and decapitate it. And he's got just the weapon to use on that, the one scanner he just found, Cameron Vale.
And so the board approves. They're like, all right, well, let's move with that program. We don't really need to see a presentation on it. We don't need to meet this guy. We trust you to do what you do, doctor Ruth.
And here we reunite with Cameron Vale. Now Ruth is back in sort of the mode less in the like we must have weapons and assassin's mode. Now he's talking to Cameron again and they discuss how Cameron is not used to talking much. This is the scene where they establish how with other people's thoughts always filling his head, he was never able to develop an identity or a personality, and that the injection of a femerol to inhibit his
scanning abilities. Since then, he's had a kind of clarity in the sense of self that he never had before. But he's also afraid because for the first time he can quote hear himself.
Yeah, and this is something that this whole view of scanning is so nicely rolled out throughout the film. You learn a little bit more and more about it, and it never feels like like an info dump or anything, because, yeah, you learn that. It's like, what's going on with scanning is kind of they describe it as like nervous systems interacting with each other. Is this kind of like communal engagement between one mind and body and the other, and then it's just comes down to like levels of awareness
and abilities to manipulate or block that shared state. So with with Cameron Vail, it's like this idea that you know, it's not just that the thoughts are coming in, but there are neural processes that he hasn't really had a chance to develop because the neural processes of others have been flowing in to take up that space in him.
Yeah, I think this aspect of the movie is so interesting, And I wonder if I almost detect in common with Videodrome a subtle media critique, which is the idea of okay, So the scanners are unable to develop a healthy self identity without either some kind of treatment like taking a femarole to silence the voices or using some other method
of getting other people's voices out of their heads. So like some scanners seem to have been able to cope by like living in total life isolation and sort of like we learn about one scanner later who does this through creating art, And I wonder could this be a commentary on NonStop passive consumption of media such as radio or TV. Which if it fills your head constantly with other voices and you're never alone with your own thoughts.
Could Cronenberg be maybe presenting a subtle argument that that sort of in a way prevents you from having a personality of your own.
Yeah, I think that's a that's a pretty solid read on it. I think there's a lot of merit to that.
So everyone turn off the podcast.
No, no, no, keep listening to the podcast NonStop at a double.
Speed, a triple speed.
It's got to be triple You can do triple speed if you do a half dose of ephemerol on top of that. I mean, it's going to vary from listener to listener, but that's a general way you want to handle it.
Oh. We also in this part of the movie get some background on Darryl Revick, which is doctor Ruth shows Cameron some old footage of him in an institution of some kind after he drilled a hole in his own skull. That's the scar on his forehead to let the pressure out, to release the pressure, and I think we get the impression that he means like the voices, and so this was Revick's way of trying to cope with the cacophony.
Yeah, this is a nice bit of trepanation' sploitation here, And of course this is based on the very real history of trepanation. If you want to learn more about Trepanation, go back into the archives. We did an episode of stuff to blow your mind about it several years back.
But here we get some indoctrination, right, Like doctor Ruth is teaching Cameron that Revick is his enemy and that reVC will try to recruit him to serve in his crusade to destroy the society that created him. And so Ruth wants to encourage Cameron to get to Revick first. So how is he gonna find Revick? Well, from here, I guess maybe we can take a lighter skip through the plot because we don't have to go scene by
scene on everything. But some of the main plot points are He's got a first lead, which is another unaffiliated scanner, a guy named Benjamin Pierce, who is an artist, a sculptor who apparently has been able to keep himself sane by creating art.
Yeah, creepy weird art with giant heads and all sorts of cool stuff. It makes for a great scene, like when he's talking to to Cameron Vale. They actually go inside a large head, like an enormous human head that has like a little like area with pillows in it inside or something. And so they're inside the head talking about the voices inside their head and it's it's nice. It works.
So Veil tracks him down through some trickery and and some scanning techniques. But then he also, you know, when he meets him, he's like, I need to find Darryl Revick, and dude wants nothing to do with this. Benjamin Pierce is just like, leave me alone. You don't want to do that. Go away. But while Vail is there, assassin's attack. REVS guys show up with shotguns and it's just shotguns. Wall to Walt. Both types of bad guys in this movie have shotguns. The concept guys have shotguns. REVS guys
have shotguns. It's like there was a sale at the shotgun store.
Yeah, yeah, a lot of shotguns in this picture.
But after this attack, Vail survives sort of psychically repelling the assassins. But Pierce as he dies tells Vail psychically to find somebody named Kim Oberst. And this is where here in this section, Vail goes to kim Obrist's would you call it like a scanner commune sort of?
Yeah, yeah, kind of a commune situation going on.
Now. We already talked a bit about what happens at this place. They seem to be engaging in a kind of ritual where they enmesh their minds with one another to achieve something previously unknown, beautiful and terrifying. And while they're doing that, Revic's assassins track Veil down and attack yet again. There's a big car chase scene and only Veil and kim Oberist survive.
Yeah, the great sequence where the bus is crashed through a record store. I don't know about you, but I really enjoyed checking out all these various records in the background, some of which were instantly recognizable, like they have multiple copies of a Frank Zappa album back there, you see a Bowie album. But then there was other stuff I just had to look up. There's this one individual that there's a poster for Hermann Brood, and I was like, has that made up? Is this some sort of a
nod to the Brood or something? But no, this is a Dutch musician that I just wasn't familiar with. It was a pretty big deal in some circles, and you know, various other little details I had to look up. And yeah, just just a well crafted sequence and well constructed set in a film that you're not going to remember for its bus crash.
Well, anyway, after this whole sequence, Veil uncovers a conspiracy. He does some corporate espionage and figures out that Michael Ironside is working out of the headquarters of a company called BioCarbon Amalgamate, and he sneaks in and he does some computer hacking and determines that they are manufacturing large quantities of a femarole and shipping them out for some secret purpose, and he wants to find out why, but access to that information is restricted.
Yeah. I love the hacking in this because it is very I mean, it's very much in line with what you also see in Ridley Scott's Alien. This is that period where computers worked by asking them a question and then the computer would tell you.
You would type request access and it would say access denied, and then you would type request override the access denied. So anyway, Vale and Overest want to find out what's going on, so they come in to meet Vale's handlers with Conseck, and then there's a big double cross because we find out that the head of security at Conseck Keller he's secretly working in cahoots with Revick and he
wants to kill them. They escape, but unfortunately Patrick McGowen, fortunately or unfortunately again a morally ambiguous character, he is killed in the process. And here we get into what I think many people now regard as the dumbest part of the movie. And I would say, if there is anything in the movie that doesn't really work well, it
is what we're about to talk about. It is the sequence where Cameron is told by doctor Ruth that he can get the computer files by scanning the computer the same way he scans a human, because a computer also has a nervous system. So he goes to a payphone and scans the computer through the phone line.
Yeah. I feel like this is a part of the film that that even I just can't imagine anyone being one hundred percent on board with this at the time, because they just don't feel like a computer is a nervous system, and certainly these computers are not nervous systems. However, if you were to make scanners today and set it in the future. I could very well imagine a situation where your computers are wetwear computers that have some sort
of organic neural component to them. And in that case, I think you could you could make an argument that, well, our psychics are able to commune with the computer because there is this they have this organic base in common. So if the if they were trying to hack not the computer system here, but the elevator from the lift, you know, that would make more sense.
Oh man, yeah, that would be good. But yeah, I think this I've regarded as the weakest point in the film. I think the sequence was on a little too long. It's not as interesting as the rest of the movie is. So there's like an attack and counter attack through like the computer's self destruct features and so forth, and then there's a big explosion.
Yeah, there is that. Cool. They're doing this all by the way, by by calling in from a payphone to hack it, and when everything blows up, they're trying to like like shut it down and destroy Cameron Veil, and they don't quite destroy him, but they do channel a lot of psychic energy through a you know this this remote phone booth and so we get the scene with the phone receiver melting in his hand, and then yeah, more explosions. So there's some good stuff sprinkled in there.
But yeah, you're right, it goes on a bit long, and of course is rooted in this kind of absurdity that feels a little bit out of pace with the rest of the picture.
I mean, I like it an exploding telephone booth. That's funny, but yeah, it's a little tonally different than the rest of the film.
Yeah, but the good news is that once they get past that, like, we're kind of back on the original rails. So if you don't like this segment of the picture, you don't have to worry too much about it because it's not going to ultimately play into the end game as much.
Right, Okay, so if you don't want the final twist of the movie revealed, you may take this opportunity to tune out, because we have to talk about what the big reveal is. What was it? What's inside the secret computer? Well, it is a list of doctors who are prescribing ephemerole
or they're prescribing it. What do they have scanner patients who want to make the voices stop no. In fact, they're prescribing Ephemeral to pregnant women as a just regular pregnant women as a tranquilizer, and we discover in fact that this is linked to the origin of the first
batch of scanners. So Ephemerole the drug was developed by doctor ruth by Patrick McGowan as a tranquilizer to be used during pregnancy, but it had the unintended side effect of causing children to be born with telepathic powers to be born as scanners, and after they discovered this, it
was discontinued. But there are all these scanners out there now and Revic and his co conspirators are sending out more of this drug to be prescribed because he wants to make a new generation of scanners and eventually recruit them for his army.
It's a fiendish plot, but one that works like it's not like Revuk has hey for him a rational plan, like he wants to make more people that are touched by the same ability so that they can become the new status quo that they can take over and they can rebel against the normal people that have made things so difficult for them.
But reVC captures Veil and Obrist and then it comes to the final showdown, which is another I'd say, you know, if there's a standout secondary scene in the movie, people remember after the demonstration with the exploding head, it's probably this last scene the showdown.
Yeah, like, can they top the exploding head? Well, they don't try to top it. They do something different that is even more horrifying in my opinion, when we also get the reveal that that Revuc and Veil are brothers, or at least that's what Revik says. Who knows if we can trust him, but he says that they are both doctor Ruth's sons, that they're the oldest of the Scanners and therefore the most powerful.
Yeah, and somehow doctor Ruth did something to make them like more powerful than all the other Scanners, which is why they have these special abilities. Yeah, they can overpower even the other Scanners.
Yeah, they got the extra ifim are all in their milk when they're babies or something. So yeah, we basically we get the scene which you might expect or if you've never seen it before, where Revk is saying, join me, brother, you know, join me on the dark side, will rise up, We'll rule over the new Scanner babies together and take over the world. Cameron Vaildo says, says, Nope, I'm not going to do that, and hits Revick in the head
with a paperweight and at that point it's on. It's a scanner battle to the death with one psychic mind attempting to dominate the other. And who, I don't know about you, Joe, but this, this entire sequence, the sequence that I've seen before, mind, you just really creep me out this time. And I mean it. And I've seen a lot of stuff in films. You know, I'm a kid who grew up watching The Bad Guy's Melt in slow motion on The Raiders VHS.
Yeah it's gross, and it's it's hard to watch, but it's also pretty astounding.
Yeah it's And I was really trying to break down, like why is this so disturbing and why does it work so well? And I think they're basically like three factors. So first of all, that the obvious our protagonist and antagonists here are both like literally destroying each other's bodies with their psychic powers here, and perhaps to destroying their own bodies as part of it as they channel these destructive powers. So like you know, faces, pulsating, stuff bursting.
It's just really it's hard to watch, especially your hero go through this level of physical trauma.
Yeah.
Secondly, the effects are just really good. These are just really solid practical effects. Like when Veil ends up gouging out parts of his own face that have just been bulging and pulsating and popping. Is just really black. It's just really gross.
It's awful. I think part of the effect of why this scene is so bad because there are other scenes where, like the hero of the movie gets injured, even you know, traumatic injuries, that aren't as awful as this. And I think it's because the injury appears to be some sort of deep, systemic malfunction of the body rather than just like getting like cuts or impacts or something.
Yeah, this is not our hero getting shot in the shoulder or anything. This is like gouging parts of his face out and then eventually his eyeballs explode. That level of trauma. And I think the third factor is that the body horror that we see in this scene. It's this weird mix of traumatic injury and mutation without ever actually crossing the line into a clear sense of movie mutation.
You know, it's like their bodies don't seem to becoming completely other, but the weird energies flowing through them are kind of horrifically exposing a hidden anatomy and it's just dreadful to behold. Yeah, Like when you see veins like pulsating in their arms and across their face, You're like, that doesn't match up to what I know is underneath the face or the arm, But I'm totally believing that what is being revealed there is real.
Yeah, well it's the secret war being revealed. Yeah, but this time it's like underneath the skin.
So yeah, they're pulsating and exploding, eventually erupting into fire. We get this kind of religious aura to it. His veil has twin flames and both of his palms and then yeah, exploding, And then we get the ending here where Oberis comes in. She finds Veil's just husk of a body. He's just completely immolated, and then she hears his voice from over in the corner. There's Veil's coat.
He has this big kind of cool jacket. It's not a jacket, it's a full fledged coat that he's wearing in most of the film, and there's a character in the corner with that coat over them. They pull the coat back and it looks like Revic, but it's not Revec's voice. It's not Reveck's mind in there, like clearly in this battle of wills, this battle of minds veil one and it's now his mind that occupies a Revck's body.
Yeah, he pulled a fast one on him. We're led to believe that, like he let reVC destroy his body, but somehow traded places with his consciousness.
Yeah. Yeah, And so we get this wonderful Cronenbergy ending where the end is the beginning. Our heroes have won because they embraced extreme change and extreme weirdness and perhaps kind of embraced a kind of posthuman identity.
You know.
It's like the way out of this problem is through it and you know, becoming this different being.
So computer scanning subplot aside, I think Scanners holds up great. This is it's excellent. It's gross in the parts that are supposed to be gross. It's shocking in the parts that are supposed to be shocking. It's also, i think, actually much smarter and more thoughtful and more interesting than a lot of initial reviewers.
Gave it credit for Yeah, and weirder than you might remember it. I found it weirder than I remembered it.
Yeah.
I should also say that, in rewatching the film, I was struck by the amount of care it seems to give this granted fantastic and sci fi horror vision of neurodiversity. So, to be clear, horror movies are not a great place to look for nuanced or insightful views of things like mental illness. But there's there's probably a lot to dissect here concerning the way the Scanner characters present these different ideas of neuro divergent again fantasy neurodivergent people in the given world.
Oh yeah, Like the way the struggles of the different Scanner characters have manifested in like different outcomes in their lives, and we see the coping strategies they've come up with, And yeah, I think that's that is interesting, Like that that Veil never really had a coping strategy until he got a medication, that like one guy had a coping strategy through through art, that Kim OBErs did through community.
Yeah, Like like he has that kind of heartbreaking moment with the artist with Pierce where he said, like Pierce is describing how the art keeps him sane, and he and granted, he's, you know, doing his spy game kind of thing here, so he's being deceitful, but he says what seems rather honestly, He's like, but I don't I don't have anything like that. I don't I don't have this thing that you have to help me combat this problem. And that's why I need you to take me to Revck.
And I don't know. Was that kind of resonated with me. It was a nice small moment in this film. Yeah, I agree, all right that Scanner's the nineteen eighty one classic. I don't think we'll be covering Scanner's two Scanners three or the Scanner cop movies. I don't know, never say never, but I feel like we covered the best one here.
Yeah. I think the sequels kind of they keep all the gross stuff and the heads exploding, but they do not retain the level of thoughtfulness of the original.
Yeah. Mostly, I think I remember at one point, this was years and years back, we were talking about scanner face and what actors make the best scanner face. So I don't remember our findings, but I think we generally agreed that Michael Ironside is hired to beat.
I think Scanner Coop has Richard Lynch in it, and I believe Richard Lynch had a pretty good scanner face.
I bet he had a good one. Yeah. And of course David Hewlett is in the initial sequel, and I haven't seen him in that where I don't remember seeing him in that, but I've seen Hewlett and other things that he's quite good in. So I was really impressed with a role that he has in the Gila de
Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities. He plays this grave robber who's desperate to get enough gold fillings out of teeth to pay off bookies, and so he's trying to rob graves and a haunted cemetery and incounting all sorts of horror and it's a wonderful performance. All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and shut the book on Scanners here, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have memories or impressions of Scanners, if you saw it
in the theater. We always love to hear those stories of people who saw these films when they originally came out or you have memories of the first time you saw it. I would love to hear from anyone who did not know that head was going to blow up? What did you think when you watch this film for the first time. A reminder that we're primarily a science podcast with core episodes and Tuesdays and Thursdays and the
stuff to blow your my podcast feed. But here on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns and we just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. I blog about these episodes at immutamusic dot com. But also you can go to letterbox dot com. It's l E T T E R b oox D and you'll find our user name on there is weird House. We have a list of all the films we've covered. This is the ninety ninth film that we've covered on Weird House Cinema. The next film we cover will be the one hundredth film.
Who knows what we'll pick for that?
Ooh, that's putting a lot of pressure on Ralbye. We gotta make a good choice.
Yeah, or you just let that pressure dissipate by exploding through the head. I don't know. Wait, maybe we just pick something like normal, and it'll become special to us because it was one hundredth picture.
There you go, huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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