Tonight I watched Scanners (1981) for the first time.
I love Michael Ironside so much. Starship Troopers is one of my all time favorite movies, and since then, every time I see him on screen it elevates a film for me. Seeing him here as a psychic renegade with the power to literally blow your mind was a real treat.
Stephen Lack was also great as the heroic Cameron Vale, and Patrick McGoohan gave a moody, melodramatic performance as Dr. Ruth.
Where Zardoz's Eternals are sedate and melancholy in their psychic emanations, the Scanners are alive with ecstasy and terror. The dissonant keening that accompanies the instances of 'scanning', alongside distorted voices and other audio artifacts, makes the process seem deeply unpleasant for every party involved, although we learn that this is not necessarily always the case. Nonetheless, the facial performances by Ironside and Lack are something to behold, and despite being objectively ridiculous, they completely work alongside that discordant soundtrack and dramatic framing.
If you haven't seen this movie, it's where that .gif of a dude in a suit's head exploding comes from. That moment comes shockingly early in the runtime, and is sadly the only total head explosion in the movie. There are tons of other cool psychic powers on display though, from telepathy and mind control to telekinesis and fire-starting. At one point Cameron reads the mind of a computer, which is pretty silly, but it sort of works alongside the techno-thriller narrative the move has going for it. The practical effects are varied and thoroughly entertaining, especially during the final psychic duel between Cameron and Ironside's Darryl Revok.
The explanation for how 'scanning' works is kind of like a quantum entanglement of two nervous systems, which is pretty cool. Dr. Ruth describes it as "the direct linking of two nervous systems separated by space." He also describes scanning in a bunch of deeply purple prose, like "a derangement of the synapses called telepathy" that really only works because he delivers the lines through a luxurious beard and mustache with the affect of a man who has been dipping into the company ketamine.
There are some decent action sequences, although I was oddly distracted by the sheer number of shotguns in this movie. Nearly every gun we see is a shotgun of some kind, and we see a lot of guns. It had to be a deliberate choice, and maybe I'm just missing some context that makes it make sense because I was not alive in 1981 when this came out, but it was conspicuous enough that I was thinking about that instead of what was happening on screen during at least a couple of scenes. During one car chase sequence, a panel van opens up gun ports along the side and issues forth a shotgun broadside like a 17th century pirate ship. It's weird.
Jennifer O'Neill plays Kim Obrist, and does a fine job. She spends most of the runtime being traumatized either by seeing her friends die or being forced to kill people with her mind, remarking at one point "Now I know what it feels like to die." She and her friends were a group of Scanners living outside the control of Dr. Ruth or Darryl Revok, until Cameron crashed into their lives and Revok sent in the shotgun squad.
The computer I mentioned earlier is a charmingly retro 80s mainframe computer, with terminal access. Very much before my time, but instantly familiar from playing the Fallout video games. The description of its magnetic tape reel-to-reel system as a "nervous system" by Dr. Ruth is a bit of a stretch, but the payoff of seeing Cameron do psychic battle with a computer is well worth the effort to suspend disbelief. The beginning of the scene brings to mind the real life 'Phone Phreakers' who could manipulate systems connected to the telephone network with audio recordings and even by whistling specific tones. Those guys basically had real technopathic powers, enabled by the weird way our communications infrastructure was set up. In any case, it's one of the best fight scenes between a man in a phone booth and computer in a building miles away ever put to film, for sure.
There is a kind of corporate espionage subplot that involves the production and distribution of a drug that suppresses Scanners' abilities (with some other effects that we discover later.) That angle creates some parallels to the real world Thalidomide scandal, as well as historical medical experimentation on the public, such as the Tuskeegee experiment, that give the plot some scope, and long-term implications.
The ending is simply fantastic, I won't ruin it by going into detail, but it's a lot of fun. Overall I feel this was a solid 4/5, with excellent practical effects, a moody and melodramatic atmosphere, and a surprisingly complex plot. Enjoyers of techno-thrillers, body horror, and beloved character actor Michael Ironside should definitely check this one out.
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