Scanners

It's October..."so maybe I should pay attention to horror films." How cliché.

I have some planned and in the hopper, but I noticed "The Large Association of Movie Blogs" is showcasing director David Cronenberg, so I'm also going to be throwing in a bunch of Cronenberg reviews from the past and the retrospective present. After all, you can't have a Cronenberg movie without a little bit of horror...somewhere.

Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981) You can weaponize anything. But, I wonder if David Cronenberg knew when he was writing and directing Scanners that the United States military was (seriously) investigating the use of psychic abilities for intelligence and warfare at Forts Mead and Bragg. The programs, dubbed "The Stargate Project" were documented by Jon Ronson in the book "The Men Who Stare at Goats," which was made into a film in 2009. No one that I've read has made the connection, and evidently Cronenberg's initial concept was far afield from what was finally put on-screen; so the film could be used as a tax write-off, it was rushed into production forcing last-minute scripting while filming. And, it isn't the military that is doing the experimentation, it's a corporate interest specializing in private security—a sort of pre-Blackwater in the world of the Military-Industrial Complex. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. And trust Cronenberg to be ahead of the curve in terms of paranoia and conspiracies.

There is an "issue" at ConSec: at a conference in which they were announcing the use of "scanners"—agents with psychic and telekinetic abilities, a demonstration was called for and a volunteer from the audience came to the stage. Rather than providing a number from 1 to 100 for the scanner to predict, the volunteer, a scanner named Revok (Michael Ironside) psychically assaulted the Consec agent causing his head to explode, resulting, as the ConSec chairman says "in six corpses and substantial loss in credibility for our organization." And all without a bone-saw. ConSec security chief Braeden Keller (Lawrence Dane) suggests, for the good of the company, that the "scanner" program be halted, but he is overruled by Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick MacGoohan), who has identified Revok from CCTV footage; Revok has acquired defector scanners from ConSec and has started his own band of rival scanning rogues. 

But Dr. Ruth has a plan: he has picked up a drifter named Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) who has been arrested for stealing food and giving a woman who gives him the stink-eye a seizure. Ruth wants to work with Vale to oppose Revok and possibly infiltrate his network. Vale has been unhinged by his abilities, but Ruth injects him with a drug he's developed called "ephemerol" (heh) that negates Vale's powers and keeps him sedate.

Vale has been homeless because his scanning abilities has made him anti-social, not knowing where they came from, but once Vale explains his gifts and shows him others with his abilities, he is able to recruit Vale for his efforts. He also helps him to channel his abilities, and is astonished by the power that Vale demonstrates when he drastically increases the heart-beat of a yoga master who has trained himself to keep it low. Ruth sets Vale a task—to find other scanners and his link to them might be through sculptor Benjamin Pierce, himself a scanner.

"I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100..." "Uuhh...No. 6?"

But, Revok has hired assassins to follow Lark to Pierce, and while Pierce is very angrily reluctant to help Lark, they are interrupted by Revok's killers who shoot Pierce—Lark uses his abilities to kill the shooters and reads from Pierce's dying mind a name: "Kim Obrist."*

Obrist (Jennifer O'Neill) is a scanner herself—there seem to be a lot of these folks (where do they come from?) and she has her own band of unaffiliated scanners. Vale attends a meeting of her group and—wouldn't you know it (especially if you have ESP!)—more of Revok's killers show up and take out Obrist's group, but Obrist is able to use her mind to kill the assassins, making them burst into flame. Lark compels the one surviving assassin to lead him to Revok and he is given a vial with the name "Biocarbon Amalgamate." Lark takes it upon himself to keep Obrist safe, but tracks down the BioCarbon facility, where he discovers it is run by Revok and they are controlling shipments of ephemerol through a ConSec program called "RIPE" and Vale contacts Ruth of what he's found out. On Ruth's instructions, Lark brings Obrist to Consec, where she is injected with ephemerol and taken by Keller to be interrogated.

So, as things gets increasingly more complicated, they also get more contained and insular, and this is where Scanners has its big drawbacks. I'm sure that the concentration of scanners in one city has more to do with budgetary considerations than any sort of story logic, but, be that as it may, it doesn't explain why it takes so darned long for Vale (or Ruth) to realize that there is probably a traitor in their midst as Revok's infiltration of the ConSec systems are so complete. You would think that folks with such enhanced brains and abilities might figure any of this out before it turns into such a murderous problem, but Cronenberg, given the constraints of time and budget is more concerned with stunning visuals than story logic.

Those "stunning visuals" (most created by make-up legend Dick Smith—he of The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Little Big Man, and The Exorcist) create the sense that anything is possible with the abilities of the Scanners—except for figuring anything out and having to rely on sleuthing like a normal person. The abilities are convenient when the script calls for them to be, but pretty useless in the main. And that's a major flaw. It's enough to make a critic's head explode.

The performances are all over the map: Lack is okay, but largely unsympathetic in an opaque kind of way—he was probably hired because he looks like he could be a derelict but also clean up real nice. O'Neill is one of those actresses that relies more on looks than personality, and she is mostly required to look earnest, like she is covering up a deep, dark secret (SPOILER ALERT: she isn't). MacGoohan, as usual, in inscrutable, an actor who's always had the ability to portray smarter even if the character doesn't call for it, merely by an ironic half-smile. On the other end of the spectrum is  Ironside. He's the master of excess, for whom subtlety seems to be a waste of time—one would say he'd be better suited for silent pictures, but even there he'd be over-the-top. His Revok is both malevolent and insane, so much so that one wonders if he could be capable of being in charge of anything if he didn't have the ability of mind control. 

Scanners is rather dumb, despite its considerable displays of brain-power. And it is giddily gruesome—as Cronenberg gleefully can be. I mean, a guy's head explodes within the first 15 minutes—and it gets worse from there. I've called Cronenberg the Enemy to the Squeamish and it is never more evident than it is in Scanners. One should hold onto one's head...or, at least, their lunch.

* Kim Obrist is listed as an assistant to producer Claude Heroux in the credits.