Word: cronenberg
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...Director Cronenberg (The Brood, The Dead Zone) tells this story with no compromise but plenty of intelligent compassion. In the film's first half, the edgy romantic comedy is beguiling, especially as played by Goldblum and Davis, two deft charmers who inhabit their roles as if they have comfortably lived there forever. The Faustian tragedy of the second half is underscored by some revolting and riveting special effects. Watch closely for Brundlefly's agile wall climbing. Close your eyes during the hallucinatory sequence in which Cronenberg, as an obstetrician, helps Veronica give birth to a 20-in.-long bouncing baby...
FOOTNOTE: *Count 'em (in order of appearance): Andrew Marton, David Cronenberg, Richard Franklin, Landis, Colin Higgins, Daniel Petrie, Jonathan Kaufer, Mazursky, Paul Bartel, Don Siegel, Jim Henson, Jack Arnold, Amy Heckerling, Roger Vadim, Lawrence Kasdan, Jonathan Demme, Carl Gottlieb...
...enough--a good little shock. Similar techniques were featured in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Brian De Palma's The Fury. The latter used the effect most spectacularly, with ten camera angles, when John Cassavettes turned to ripe tomatoes all over the dining room walls. But Cronenberg is a terrible director when it comes to shocks and thrills. He uses this effect once--at an anticlimactic moment, thus short-changing core fiends and shock jocks...
THAT'S THE PROBLEM. Cronenberg isn't a two-bit avaricious director; he's the best. And Scanners, an almost immediate sellout, must certainly be his worst film...
...sanity by expressing his scanner-related anxiety in his sculpture. The scenes at Pierce's exhibition and in his private studio are the film's most powerful moments. Expressionist figures contort and silently scream, communication more about the life of a scanner than the rest of the movie. Cronenberg understands that kind of horror. He can translate the internal and intangible into something real and terrifying...