In 1981, David Cronenberg – with three innovatively gory sci-fi/horrors, two low-budget amateur films, and one car-racing oddity (Fast Company) under his belt – delivered to date the most commercial of his bleak visions. While Scanners was not nearly as marketable as the Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone, nor would it ultimately prove to be the surprise hit The Fly was, Scanners nonetheless performed admirably given its budget and allowed Cronenberg to continue exploring his unique personal vision on a moderately larger scale.
The success of Scanners likely comes down to its comparatively unchallenging story. While rather underdeveloped – the rushed shoot began before the script was finished – it presents a world in which, as yet unbeknownst to the world at large, individuals dubbed “Scanners” are born with innate, sometimes uncontrollable, and often dangerous psychic powers. Our protagonist, the vagrant Cameron Vale, finds himself caught up in a war between Dr. Ruth (Patrick McGoohan), an ironically ruthless psychologist, and Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), a rebel Scanner bent on the genocide of all non-Scanners.
That may not sound entirely conventional, and that’s a simplified version without the film’s numerous diversions exploring factions whose motivation isn’t always entirely clear. Still, if you were to imagine a Cronenberg plot as a sleazy 1980s-90s sci-fi thriller, Scanners hews far closer to that than the grotesque sexual viruses of Shivers and Rabid, or the chilly, divorce-driven The Brood. Its plot also unfolds in a reasonably straightforward, if underdeveloped, fashion, and comes complete with gun battles, car chases and the greatest exploding head in cinema history.
Of course, Cronenberg is a director with such peculiar recurring motifs – paranormal medical and psychiatric institutes, the intersection of art, biology and commerce, characters with bizarre names like Revok and A. Crostic – that, like David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick, at its most conventional his work remains unmistakably his and no-one else’s. Even the notion of psychic power itself speaks to the director’s fascination with the the mind’s existence as a product of the gooey impermanence of the human body itself. Here is a film whose head-explosion speaks to the brain as well as the viscera, which makes this a more interesting take on psychic abilities than, say, Cronenberg’s followup The Dead Zone, or other psychics-battle-conspiracy stories like X-Men. Cronenberg has almost never made a dull film, excepting two early and little-seen efforts, and while Scanners ranks somewhere around the middle in terms of his overall œuvre, it remains arrestingly strange, challenging, and oddly compelling despite a muddled plot and an uneven pace.
In the extras, we get two commentaries: one by critic and academic Caelum Vatnsdal, who specialises in the very niche field of Canadian horror, which makes him surely the perfect person to analyse Scanners, or most of Cronenberg’s 70s-80s output. His commentary is informative, perhaps a little dry, but can be recommended to Cronenberg enthusiasts, new fans, and even those baffled by the hailing of Cronenberg as a modern master director, as he frequently talks us through the effectiveness of choices in structure, shot composition, casting, and so on. The second commentary comes from another film critic, William Beard, and while it is fine in its own right it covers a lot of the same ground as Vatnsdal’s superior commentary, and suffers from Beard’s tendency to simply explain what we’re seeing as it happens.
There are three interviews with actors, carried over from Second Sight’s earlier release: The first is “My Art Keeps Me Sane”, with Stephen Lack. One feels for Lack: nominally the star as Cameron Vail, Lack has been near-universally considered the film’s weakest link; on the other hand, he is a visual artist by trade and was not a professional actor while making Scanners, nor has he acted since. He tells some amusing anecdotes and recalls his time on the film fondly, “like a night in a whorehouse”. “Method in his Madness” features Michael Ironside, who tells some of his favourite Cronenberg stories, such as the one about the preying mantis dream. He may have played a staggering number of mean bastards over the years, but he’s quite an avuncular storyteller. Finally, “Bad Guy Dane” with Lawrence Dane, who played the heavy Braedon Keller, is too short to really make much of an impression. As for the crew interviews, “The Eye of Scanners” features cinematographer Mark Irwin recounting his journey from shooting hardcore porn, to softcore, then to slashers and into mainstream cinema via Cronenberg films. We also get “Mind Fragments” with Cronenberg’s regular composer Howard Shore, which is a fairly technical recounting of his many collaborations with Cronenberg, and the differences between each – this is one of the best features on the disc. “The Chaos of Scanners” features exec producer Pierre David; of all the features, this is the one that dives the most into the fundamentals of how Scanners got made, and would therefore have been better placed earlier in the features list, but this is a minor quibble. Fittingly, for a film and a filmmaker so much more famous for gruesomeness than anything else, there are two interviews with makeup artists: “Exploding Brains & Popping Veins” with Stephan Dupuis and “Monster Kid” with Chris Walas. Finally, we get a video essay, “Cronenberg’s Tech Babies” by Tim Coleman, which covers Cronenberg’s key themes and pays special attention to early-80s classics such as Scanners and Videodrome.
★★★★★