*Blog post started on December 14, 2020.
This is a fun vampire flick, but it shows the limitations of John Carpenter. His direction seems stretched by the quest elements of the tale and without one of his go to actors in the lead, it loses some of the feeling his classics have. He was best in the mid 80’s leaning in to his regulars. I wish he would be more insistent on doing that. Still, the FUN is there and James Wood is great. On to Bon Jovi taking over the franchise.
Check out my video visceral reactions to "Vampires" at Main Event of the Dead.
I suppose I am stretching out the weekend technically. This was probably watched on Wednesday, but I am in the midst of a 13-day stretch between both jobs, so time is kind of lost on me. "John Carpenter's Vampires" is almost an appropriate place to start as I am trying to use meal replacement shakes for 50% of my meals (I skip breakfast, unless I wake up before the alarm. Wendy's is killing it.). Sucking the blood out of someone felt like a reasonable means of recovering from the lack of sleep that "Cyberpunk 2077" led to.
It did not help when a coworker goes home because they were not feeling well. I work for a big box store, so you know they have COVID-19 protocols for their employees. If you passed the screening for the day, you got to work your shift. The argument can be made that it is flu season so not everything is corona virus. How you can suddenly change symptoms in two hours is my counter to that?
Fuck food poisoning. That is why I skip breakfast. I need to make the proletariat look good.
When my manager asked me to stay an extra hour (We could not get rid of the customers till a half hour after the Semisonic moment.), it seemed like the ill-feeling one was not a full-time employee. This means they did not have any time to use to make up the lost wages. If your lungs have not been overtaken by the pandemic, that really is the only reason to leave a job early. Use the sick time or lose the sick time. I can understand that proposition.
But on the flip side, at my bank job, we have one employee who uses the time that has been allocated to them while the coworker who should get more than six days of paternity leave cannot use his sick time to spend more time with his child and the kid's worn out mom. Should I rant about the corporate structure (Thank the gods that there is not really any right-leaning charities in Champaign. I would be judged for not participating in casual days for charity because of the not-for-profits that dominate the rest of Downstate Illinois [Christian pregnancy support groups, United Way, etc.].), or management at this location for not covering for the most senior banker here:?
If wanting to drain the employee who left with two opening to closing shifts is the only drama I have right now, things are pretty good. There was some hesitation about reviewing two James Woods movies because of the conservative moron he has become (I wanted to see the Democratic Party be destroyed after the Clinton impeachment trial, but I was an 18 year-old Mortonite. With experience, I learned who the bad guys truly are.), but everyone knows that the works of great directors should take precedence over the whom the producer believes will put butts in seats. Maybe this double-feature will let me get over my reservations and buy the Hades from "Hercules" Funko Pop. You cannot have Zeus without the douche.
And that reminds me, we need to bust our asses to get Tiny Lister into the WWE Hall of Fame this year. We must influence WWE programming some how. The WWE video arena must be conquered. Death to the McMahon family's Videodrome. Long with the new flesh.
Videodrome (1983)
Max Renn is one of the three partners who operated Channel 83 in Toronto. Their goal is to provide viewers with something they cannot get from traditional and regulated television stations. They must not be the only content providers with that goal, so when exploitative foreign entertainment seems to be too tame, Renn begins to search for programming that is down right sleazy and horrific. Luckily for them, their satellite technician Harlan is the master of television piracy and has discovered a show out of Pittsburgh called "Videodrome", an arena for torture, exploitation and murder.
Because of the signal scrambling, Channel 83 cannot just go air it. This leads Renn on a mission to find the people behind the show. With every clue he obtains, he starts experiencing violent hallucinations. Most of these involve his sadomasochistic girlfriend, Nikki, who has also made it her mission to "star" on "Videodrome". As he absorbs more of the shows content, the visions of his body becoming a means of distributing the content are the most prevalent.
He can neither make heads or tails of what is real or not. As far as he can tell, someone is manipulating him into becoming an organic VCR who will act on whatever tapes they insert into him. Is Renn a slave to Videodrome or is he the evolutionary link between television and humanity?
"Videodrome" gives you an almost incomprehensible concept and demands that the viewer sense of it. David Cronenberg is such a talented director that the audience wants to put this puzzle together while the violent and sexual themes suggest that they should be examining who they are.
The casting of James Woods is perfect because of his cynical and self-righteous demeanor many of his previous (and most of his latter) works have had. His characters tend to think that he is smarter than everyone, thus he can handle questionable material without being influenced by it. If you want a person who seems amoral, Woods was the go to. Renn starts out as the caricature of Woods and you become enamored with his journey from being amoral to trying to find meaning in a world that is falling apart.
Cronenberg keeps the atmosphere ambiguous enough that it is even hard for the audience to tell what is suppose to be real in this world and what is only in the head of the lead. By the third act, everything that happens has to be accepted as real if you hope to make any sense of it, but you know in the back of the mind, it cannot be.
Geiger body horror is never going to be a real thing. It is something that is so traumatizing, you want to believe that it cannot be real. This is the feeling that makes this film a classic.
If there is any shortcoming, it could be an under-developed supporting cast. Then again, if you add more characters to muddle Renn, the visceral discomfort might be lost. The impact of the body horror would be stretched so thin that the impact of it might be lost. Debbie Harry as Nikki and Jack Creley as video guide Prof. Brian O'Blivion are great avatars to ground Renn's journey without taking the focus away from the insanity.
"Videodrome" still makes viewers question the impact that visual content has on them and consider what the limits should or should not be. It is an expression of a dream that the audience has to be brave enough to indulge. David Cronenberg is happy to take you by the hand and drag you through it, and he rewards you for it. This definitely makes it one of the top horror films of the 80's, and I would not be surprised if Cronenberg dominates that list.
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