Videodrome

Cronenberg has always crossed the line between taste and distaste with his combinations of vile glop-horror and social criticism, and this is no exception. A cable TV programmer (Woods) becomes increasingly intrigued by the hardcore S/M movies he is beaming down from satellite, and so does his girlfriend (Harry), a dead-eyed sensation-seeker with cigarette brands on her breast to prove it. The plotline becomes too contorted to go into here, and far, far too weird; sufficient to note that Cronenberg's most interesting trick is to eradicate the difference between hardware and software by giving his hero a pulsing vagina-like slot in his stomach through which he can be programmed by... it gets much worse. 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. CPea.