Time for a palate cleanser, I think. After the wet paper towel that was the Flatliners remake, it's always good to look at how a proper sci-fi/medical horror film does it. And so here we are with Scanners, a David Cronenberg film.
In the near future of the early 80s, there are people known as "Scanners", individuals born with telepathic and psychokinetic abilities as the result of a drug their mothers took during pregnancy. After global security company ConSec lose their one "tame" Scanner to an attack by psychotic rogue Scanner Darryl Revok, Dr. Paul Ruth brings in a "new" Scanner, a homeless man called Cameron Vale, to try to infiltrate Revok's group and stop him. Infiltrating the Scanner underground proves more difficult for Vale than was first anticipated, however, and he soon finds himself and Revok locked in a cat and mouse game... and that Revok has some surprising allies helping him with his plans...
As I sit here writing this review in my Ephemerol t-shirt, with my Scanners poster in the mail, and with a David Cronenberg category on this very blog, you might be able to guess that I'm a bit of a fan of this film, and you'd be right. Scanners was in fact the first Cronenberg film I ever saw - before even his remake of The Fly - and it set me on the Cronenberg-loving path I'm still on to this very day. The vast majority of Cronenberg's films deal with transhumanism, body modification and/or alternate forms of human evolution, and while Scanners is more grounded than, say, Shivers or Rabid (it's actually one of his most conventional films, in fact), it still primarily focuses on those themes.
Of course, the scene everyone knows from Scanners is that exploding head scene that occurs near the start of the film. The effect was created by make-up artist Dick Smith, who filled a latex head with dog food, leftovers, fake blood and rabbit livers, and then had it shot from behind with a 12-gauge shotgun. A low-tech effort for sure, but a very effective one - not to mention one that likely woke up audiences everywhere who might have thought they were in for a staid white-collar thriller up to that point. Of course, on the other side of the coin having a scene such as this as the second scene in your film and then not having anything that comes close to it until the film's climax probably bothered the people who had seen Cronenberg's previous films and were therefore expecting bizarre sexually-charged body horror from start to finish, but in the end it all worked out as Scanners was Cronenberg's most commercially successful film until he did The Fly in 1986.
The two biggest names in Scanners are Patrick McGoohan, best known for declaring that he was a man and not a number, and Michael Ironside, that hard-working character of movies and TV for about 40 years now. In fact, Ironside was just beginning his film career at the time he made Scanners, and his role as Darryl Revok was really his first major movie role and the one that put him on the map. It also showed us just how good Ironside was at playing psychotics, as his long TV and movie resume shows (among other roles, he's also been the voice of none other than Darkseid several times). Stephen Lack and Jennifer O'Neill (the latter of whom was actually top-billed but doesn't appear in the film until 37 minutes in) also perform well as the "good " Scanners fighting against the evil Revok.
The idea of the Scanners being created by a drug given to their mothers during pregnancy probably struck a chord with many people, as it bears some resemblance to the Thalidomide scandal of the 1950s and 60s, and because of that it leant an air of reality to the film; not only that birth defects could be so much out of the mothers' control, but there are also the fears of the next evolutionary step being able to replace us and the dangers they cause. Years ago, I made Nick watch Scanners with me, and the main thing he took away from the film was a complaint that telepaths shouldn't be able to do some of the things that the Scanners do - primarily the scene where Cameron Vale connects to a computer via a pay phone. But, you know, exploding heads were fine (not to mention the sex slugs from Shivers which he also had no problem with). Scanners certainly isn't hard sci-fi, that's true, but it's more within the limits of plausibility than other Cronenberg films, and what's more, it's good. It doesn't need to be scientifically realistic or accurate. Although it did spawn a franchise of questionable quality...