Videodrome (1983)

Simultaneously stupefying and boring, Videodrome is too extreme a blunder to survive exposure to a justifiably disillusioned horror-movie public.

Film is dotted with video jargon and ideology which proves more fascinating than distancing. And Cronenberg amplifies the freaky situation with a series of stunning visual effects.

Never coherent and frequently pretentious, the film remains an audacious attempt to place obsessive personal images before a popular audience -- a kind of Kenneth Anger version of Star Wars.

There are distinct signs of strain in the plot convolutions, not least in the spectator's loss of faith over indiscriminate and cheating use of hallucination; what certainly survives is Cronenberg's wholesale disgust with the world in general.

Though Videodrome finally grows grotesque and a little confused, it begins very well and sustains its cleverness for a long while.

Here, Cronenberg is a provocateur only to a point - boldly striding past boundaries of comfort but getting the heebie-jeebies upon approaching true profundity. But he wasn't too far from figuring out which incisions could cut the deepest.

...an intriguing, deeply interesting film that over the course of almost three decades has acquired a prescient quality, but it's also schlock; a kind of cyberpunk rewrite of Network that indulges Cronenberg's taste for venereal horror.

There's little denying that Cronenberg was way ahead of his time with much of Videodrome.

... Videodrome is as contemporary and relevant as ever.

[I]t stands out as one of Cronenberg's very best.

David Cronenberg's most visionary and audacious film up to the time of its making, Videodrome is a fascinating rumination on humanity, technology, entertainment, sex, and politics that is virtually incomprehensible on first viewing.

Veers from being risible to sinister as it explores how viewers are brainwashed by TV.