THOUGHTS PROVOKE
"All right, we're gonna do this the scanner way. I'm gonna suck your brain dry." - Daryl Revok (Michael Ironside)
I used to think that David Cronenberg was nothing more than a Canadian George Romero rip-off. After all, his first two feature films (SHIVERS/THE PARASITE MURDERS/THEY CAME FROM WITHIN and RABID) featured people becoming "infected" and attacking/"infecting" others, a la NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and/or THE CRAZIES. And a year after DAWN OF THE DEAD raised the splatter-movie bar with an exploding head scene ten minutes into the flick, Cronenberg countered with SCANNERS (1980), a killer-telepath flick --already in the shadow of De Palma’s THE FURY -- whose big grossout scene is...you guessed it...an exploding head at the ten-minute point.
So: I used to think Cronenberg = Romero rip-off.
I used to be an idiot. 
Cronenberg has since proven to be one of the most consistently original auteurs in the horror/fantasy genre, and SCANNERS -- despite erratic performances and plot holes big enough to send both of THE FLY’s telepods through -- is shaping up as the film one immediately thinks of when Cronenberg’s name is mentioned. Contrasting cold, clean architecture with various mixes of blood, pus, slime, and viscera, Cronenberg’s characters (mainly scientists) inflict their mutant creations of an unsuspecting world with both the best of intentions and the worst of results. It’s no wonder he was once considered to helm a version of FRANKENSTEIN: he’s been telling the story of Victor Frankenstein’s spiritual godchildren virtually from the start of his career!
The mad scientist this time around is Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan, bewhiskered and plummy), a "psychopharmacist" whose tranquilizer Ephemerol resulted in the birth of telepathic mutants known as "scanners." Right off, we’re introduced to the two main (and most powerful) scanners: Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a derelict who’s first shown inflicting his brain power on a woman in a shopping mall’s food court, and Daryl Revok (Michael Ironside, in the role that introduced him as a screen heavy par excellance), leader of a "scanner underground," who infiltrates a telepathy demonstration being given by the security/weapons corporation ConSec and gives the demonstrator (Lou Del Grande) the ultimate migraine headache. Yeah, we’re talking The Headblast here, and it’s a doozy, a solid #2 on the Top 10 Exploding Heads In Film list (although in the aftermath shots, the stage and desk are bereft of blood and brains -- just a li’l continuity glitch).
[Historical note: under pressure from his producers, Cronenberg filmed (but did not print) an alternate take in which Del Grande suffered a "grotesque" (his words) heart attack, to be used if the flick ever made it to network TV. He needn’t have bothered; the Sci-Fi channel has shown SCANNERS with its headblast intact, and even Linda (TERMINATOR 2) Hamilton used the scene as a sight gag when she hosted Saturday Night Live!]
Cronenberg’s theme here (a carryover from his student/underground debut STEREO [1969]) is "ESP hurts" -- and not just to the scannees (Del Grande’s scanner warns his audience "the scanning process is usually a painful one [with] nosebleeds, headaches, [and] nausea"), but to the scanners themselves. In an early scene, Vale is strapped to a bed and observed by a room full of silent men and women -- yet their thoughts hammer at him mercilessly until Dr. Ruth calms him with a shot of Ephemerol. Later, Vale and Dr. Ruth view a filmed interview with Revok (a scary, seemingly improvised turn by Ironside) who’s in a mental hospital after trying to drill a hole in his forehead to let the voices out. Another scanner, sculptor Ben Pierce (Cronenberg semi-regular Robert Silverman) isolates himself from his public on a remote farm; when he declares "It’s my art that keeps me sane," it’s clear he’s anything but. And when Revok finally captures Vale, the two end the film with the psychic equivalent of a chainsaw duel, tearing chunks out of each other with their respective brainwaves (Revok’s demise proved potent enough to be used as SCANNERS’ poster art). The only positive scanning experience comes when Vale joins a group of nice scanners led by Kim Obrist (Jennifer O’Neal, in a nothing role) in a psychic group grope.
Like I said earlier, SCANNERS is not a flawless pic; the script was being rewritten as shooting progressed, much to the consternation of O’Neal (whose character changed names about three times) and McGoohan, and is full of loose ends and dramatic shortcuts. Not only that, when the climactic Vale/Revok telepathic duke-out fell flat as initially filmed, Cronenberg used moneys budgeted for a Dolby soundtrack to hire makeup effects guru Dick Smith and really make the flesh peel. But even those problems pale next to the casting of Stephen Lack as Vale; although his pale blue eyes and expressive grimacing work during the scanning scenes, Lack gives some of the worst line readings in movie history, right down there with those kickboxing Frog thesps Olivier Gruner (NEMESIS) and Jean-Claude Van Damme. It’s not helped by the fact that Lack is bracketed by two very good performances from McGoohan and especially Ironside, whose icy sneer during his scanning attacks is truly the stuff of nightmares.
A few years back, SCANNERS’ producers sold the rights to the story, resulting in a series of cheapjack straight-to-video sequels which capitalized on the original’s exploding-head scene -- much like THE FLY II existing only to re-utilize Chris Walas’ animatronic BrudleFly and precious little else. (SCANNERS II [1991] made a token effort at linkage by making its protagonist the son of Vale and Obrist). Of the bunch, the only one even halfway worth recommending is SCANNERS III: THE TAKEOVER (1992), whose villainess (Liliana Komorowska) brain-zaps her opponents with such vicious glee I’m surprised the filmmakers didn’t make her the illegitimate daughter of Daryl Revok. (Now THERE’s a scary thought: a female equivalent of Michael Ironside!) Next to these clunky clones, the original SCANNERS -- warts and all -- looks more and more like a classic every time I watch it.
Allright, we're going to link to these sites the Scanner way:
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