Videodrome (1983) on Netflix
Max Renn runs CIVIC-TV, a Toronto station built on sensationalist programming. When Harlan, who works its satellite dish, finds a pirate broadcast of torture, Max wants the show.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb7.2/10114,797 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes83%
Trailer
Plot summary
Max Renn runs CIVIC-TV, a Toronto UHF station whose late night lineup leans on sensation. Harlan, who operates its unauthorized satellite dish, pulls down Videodrome, a plotless program claiming to come from Malaysia that shows people being tortured and killed. Max decides the signal is the kind of programming his channel needs and has Harlan record it. Nicki Brand, a radio host with sadomasochistic tastes who becomes involved with Max, finds the broadcasts arousing, learns they are transmitted from Pittsburgh, and goes there to audition. Max asks Masha, a softcore pornographer, to trace who is behind the transmissions, and Masha names the media theorist Brian O'Blivion.
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Cast
- David Boltas Raphael
- Henry Gomezas Brolley
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Videodrome (1983)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- James Woods was afraid of being electrocuted by the Videodrome helmet, so Cronenberg put the thing on himself and doubled for his leading man in the shot.
SPOILER
Three endings were shot. The one used, in which Max shoots himself on the derelict ship, was James Woods' own suggestion; a discarded epilogue had Bianca and Nicki appearing with chest slits of their own on the Videodrome set.- The tapes pushed into the slit in Max's stomach are Betamax cassettes for a practical reason: VHS tapes were too big for the fake wound. Woods grew so tired of wearing the appliance that he complained he was no longer an actor, just the bearer of the slit.
- The breathing television was built by hand: Frank C. Carere worked an air compressor through valves wired to a piano keyboard, while the bulging screen was a sheet of rubbery dental dam with the picture rear-projected onto it.
- Cronenberg called the first test screening, of a cut running about 72 to 75 minutes, the most disastrous imaginable: he and editor Ronald Sanders had trimmed out so much that viewers could not even tell that Max Renn worked at Civic TV.
- Beyond the cuts the MPAA demanded, Universal's Bob Remy asked Cronenberg to remove a dildo from the fake soft-core short Samurai Dreams, a note that baffled the director because the censors themselves had never raised it.
