Scanners (1981)
(YouTube Streaming, December 2019) It took me far too long to watch Scanners, but it was worth the wait. Partially filmed in nearby Montréal, this early David Cronenberg film has nearly everything that’s great and terrible about Cronenberg’s work. It’s imaginative, as humans with superpowers hunt each other in a delightfully down-to-earth circa-1980 Montréal. It’s wild, as most people will first remember the shocking exploding head that comes much earlier in the picture than anybody expects, or the psychic battle finale that anticipates a whole anime subgenre. It’s crammed with interesting details, creating a sense of reality far greater than its meagre budget should allow. Unfortunately, Scanners is infamously undisciplined—as a result of production constraints, the script was reportedly rewritten on-the-fly, leading to significant lulls in interest, scenes that aren’t as strongly built as they should be, and tangents that aren’t strengthened. It’s got energy but little rigour, and if the science fiction/horror hybrid can be impressive in a blunt-force kind of way, it’s also incredibly disappointing as well—a stronger script would not have undermined the assets of the film. Nonetheless, I can see why Scanners has so impressed generations of filmgoers: it’s striking enough to be memorable, and not only for its infamous exploding-head sequence.