Videodrome is Cronenberg's best film. It perfectly combines his most recognisable themes and images into an unnerving film that blurs the lines of reality and virtuality, sex and machine, body and object in even more evocative ways that his other films. The concept of the film is ingenious, fusing fears about violent films, pornographic videos, "Big Brother" culture, cancer and artificial intelligence into a horror-thriller that leaves the viewer constantly confused about whether they are in the main story, a virtual realm or even a digitally-inflicted dream space. James Woods gives a career-best performance as Max Renn, who basically suffers the same confusion and disturbing emotions as the audience. He loops in and out of the films that he watches, entering into bodily S&M relationships with televisions, opening his body up and inserting a gun into his stomach and ultimately murdering many of his colleagues in a manic stupor inflicted by the media that has become a part of his everyday existence. Videodrome has aged magnificently, despite being primarily about an obsolete technological format (VHS). It says a lot about contemporary relationships with technological devices (smartphones and tablets, for example) which have become like fleshy prosthetic extensions of people's existence today. The TVs and videos in Videodrome are living, breathing symbioses of flesh and technology - there is no difference between what exists on the screen and what exists in the physical world. That is the most terrifying aspect of this wonderful film, and of many of Cronenberg's films from the same period. Videodrome is not just another technophobic cyberpunk thriller - it is an eerily accurate prophecy of what the world has since become. Long live the new flesh.
