I love David Chronenburg's more linear work, but I'm not always a fan of his more surreal / abstract movies. As such I can safely say I appreciated Videodrome... But I didn't really enjoy it.
It begins straightforwardly enough; Max (James Woods) is the owner of a small TV station, which keeps its viewers by showing a steady stream of sleaze, violence. And soft porn. Max is delighted when a friend of his discovers and decodes a scrambled satellite signal of a show called "Videodrome" a plotless (fake?) snuff show, in which a bound person is beaten, tortured, and murdered. Believing that Videodrome could be the next big thing for his station, Max sets out to track down the makers of the show, with hope of buying the rights and bringing it to his channel.
Predictably enough Max gets embroiled in a conspiracy as the show turns out not to be what it seems.... But not in the way you may imagine; after being exposed to the show, Max starts having a series of hallucinations and the Videodrome broadcast turns out to be somthing even more sinister.
Along the way Max gets himself a severely masochistic girlfriend (Deborah Harry) who becomes determined to star in Videodrome, and his hallucinations take a turn into body horror.
It's here that the movie excels; the Body Horror effects are superb, in a way that only latex and foam rubber can be (there's a reason we haven't seen much Body Horror since CGI took over the FX industry) oddly some earlier effects in the movie evoke the same feel; the mailable television in particular felt like body horror, despite the melting and stretching being limited at that point to an inanimate object.
Sadly, the whole movie just failed to hang together for me; it seemed to be trying so hard to have a message, that despite some interesting ideas, and stellar performances form Woods and Harry, I found my attention drifting.
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