Scanners, 3 stars

The good news is the head-explosion scene has aged remarkably well and is still quite shocking even in today's desensitized filmgoing climate. The bad news is that the movie around it probably looked dated when it was released and now looks even worse. This is a classic by early Cronenberg standards, similar in tone and skill to "Shivers", which was made six years earlier. Between the two films Cronenberg made "The Brood", a film that foreshadowed what a fine and distinctive director he would become. But "The Brood" is bookended by two films that hint at Cronenberg's obsession with bodily fluids and control of the physical by the mental, yet which both feature acting which could be confused with line reading and wardrobes that seem to have come from the actors' own closets.

Cameron, our hero, wanders the world hearing the thoughts of others and being able to control them (the film calls this ability "scanning"). For this he has been ostracized and wanders as a vagrant until a kindly doctor takes him in and shows him how to control this ability. In return for these skills the doctor would like Cameron to find a rogue scanner named Darryl Revok, who has been leading an underground movement and threatening stability with his mind-reading powers.

**HERE BE SPOILERS** In a final-act twist that will surprise no one, Cameron and Darryl are revealed to be brothers. An unintentionally hilarious scanning showdown follows, in which Stephen Lack (Cameron) and Michael Ironsides (Darryl) frown intently at each other for several minutes and bug their eyes until one of them catches on fire. I won't give away the result, but suffice to say that the blaze seems to have freed up the loser for a long and prolific career as a film heavy, while the winner was never heard from again.*
**SPOILERS END HERE**

It may sound as though my opinion of this film merits somewhat less than three stars. In defense of my rating I will say that, were this a one-time film from a director we never heard from again, it would earn fewer points. Sad, but true. As a step in the career of David Cronenberg, however, it reveals early stages of many obsessions he would later elaborate on. The fact that in 1981 someone was shooting bags of liver with shotguns and calling it cinema is encouraging, and the long and ever-evolving career this man had ahead of him is even more so.

*Apparently this is a half-truth. Stephen Lack, who appears to be reading from cue cards for this entire film, has a few other credits to his name. Cronenberg apparently gave him a part in "Dead Ringers", which I have not yet seen, and he had an unnamed role in something called "A 20th Century Chocolate Cake" in 1983. His most recent credit is "Ernstfall in Havanna" from 2002, which is apparently in Swiss German. I rest my case.