Scanners

 Scanners is the first movie in a prequel trilogy to the Scanner Cop movies. For this one, the producer behind all the movies in the series, Pierre David, tapped relatively well-known fellow Canadian David Cronenberg to write and direct.

 Of course, Cronenberg had little idea that his producer would run a decent streak of B-movies (most of them terrible) out of the back of his tight, mostly serious-minded little thriller. It's based on a couple different scripts Cronenberg had been thinking about pitching to Roger Corman for a while... influenced more than a little by Stephen King's Firestarter and Carrie, going by the finished product.

 To claim government subsidies (those Canadian commies) the film was hurried into production way before it was ready - Cronenberg has commented that he was writing the script the morning for scenes that he would shoot later in the day. Not that you can tell that much - the film is a bit strangely paced and structured, but not more than you'd expect from the director of Rabid and The Brood.

Headsplosion!

 The plot follows one Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a weirdo who walks into a mall driven to distraction by the voices in his head - which are quickly revealed to be the thoughts of people around him. 

  He's chased down by a couple of shady characters, who shoot him with tranquilizer darts and put him under the care of Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan, having a lot of fun chewing the scenery). The good doctor informs Cameron that he's a scanner - a person born with telepathic and psychokinetic powers. After a little training, he conscripts Vale as a sort of superpowered spy to infiltrate a sort of underground terrorist cell led by rogue scanner Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside).

 Revok is -by far- the best thing in the movie, an amoral badass played with unhinged ferocity by Ironside. He's introduced assassinating a rival scanner in one of the most iconic gore moments of the '80s, a messy headsplosion (achieved by someone shooting a prop with a shotgun!) that's still a beauty to behold. That's immediately followed by a great escape scene as he gets a bunch of guards to kill each other off using his scanner powers. Cronenberg is always great when he indulges his more basic genre leanings; And here we even get from him that most eighties of action conventions, the car that is immediately engulfed by a fireball upon crashing. It's glorious.

 Unfortunately -and this is always the bit I forget when rewatching this- we're stuck with Cameron for most of the running time, and he's a complete bore of a character, a bland leading man with absolutely nothing going for him except good looks and a killer action hero name. Lack is pretty wooden in the role, but there's not that much anyone could have done in his place; It's about as generic a thriller protagonist as you could come up with.

 All this is brought into sharp relief later when, while searching for Revok he runs into Kim Obrist (Jennifer O'Neill) -  the leader of a new-agey cell of scanners who reject the people trying to manipulate them and use their powers for self-enlightenment. Even though she -in true '80s genre movie fashion- barely gets anything to do besides watching from the sidelines, she's immediately a much more human, interesting character than the protagonist's robotic plot pawn.

 The story beats are fairly standard - Vale and Obrist unravel a shady, barely-developed conspiracy as he tracks down Revok, all the while dodging or killing assassins sent to hinder them. Many of the plot's particulars remain elusive, and the pacing -while brisk- feels a bit off. Given the circumstances behind the film, though, it's amazing it works half as well as it does. 

 There are multiple action scenes, all pretty well done and fairly exciting even when the shotgun-toting bad guys' hilariously awful marksmanship would make a Star Wars Stormtrooper tut-tut disapprovingly. The suspense is really well handled, too - I love a sequence where a bunch of gunpeople approach a barn where our hero is investigating - and there are a few neat visual ideas peppered throughout. The barn above, for example, belongs to an avant-garde artist, and he has a conversation with Vale inside a giant hollow head. 

 Not so successful: the mind battles between scanners, which look like two of the world's most constipated people trying to take a dump in front of the camera.

 Everything else is pretty top-notch. The cinematography (by Mark Irwin*) is chilly, and Howard Shore's atonal synth-based score complements the action well. And the effects, of course, are spectacular. Watching this on a big screen from a new transfer, the fidelity is high enough that you can easily spot the latex fake skin patches used for some of the F/X. This, not that the planet is soon heading for an environmental disaster, is the hideous cost of modern technology.