Scanners

Rating:
Summary: A Mental Yawner
Review: David Croneberg's 1980 film about telepathic humans being recruited by government and an evil corporate defense contractor. The good telepath Cameron ( Stephen Lack) comes upon the conspiracy and seeks to do the right thing. An evil telepath named Revok ( Michael Ironside) seeks to carry out his evil plan and stop Cameron.

Horrible film quality that has every trapping of a "B" movie. Terribly outdated and overrated. The script is dull, the story is predictable, the acting utterly mediocre, and the special effects are cheap. It's time for this movie to find its Hollywood grave.

Rating:
Summary: No Need to Scan Me, I Tell You I Liked This Film.
Review: There's wonderful scenes. Theres over two hundred people who are scanners. The scanners have telepathic abilities. They can cause lots of damage. There's strange things. The brains are in a great danger when these guys and ladies are moving. Watch this film! It's something new in the film industry!

Rating:
Summary: not true about the none europe can see it
Review: My sister just bought the dvd and we live in europe so its not only in canada and usa u can buy this .

We bought it and there was loads of it really chep about 6 us dollars but only 1 and 2 was there not 3 :/ .

Rating:
Summary: Splitting Headache...
Review: The government is at it again, this time trying to recruit "scanners" (telepaths w/ telekinetic as well as pyrokinetic abilities) for a secret project. Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) is found / captured at a shopping mall after turning a woman's brain into pudding. He awakens at "CONSEC", a government installation for the bringing in of scanners. Meanwhile, Revok (Michael Ironside) busts up a meeting of corporate executives who are there to see what a scanner is. Revok volunteers to be scanned by the guest speaker. Instead, Revok makes the poor guy's head explode like a poodle in a microwave! Dr. Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) sends Vale out to find Revok and his mysterious scanner underground. Along the way, Vale runs across a separate underground of benevolent scanners. This group includes Kim (Jennifer O'Neill). Soon, Revok is at war with them and sends several assassins to finish them off. Many secrets are revealed, and things are nothing like what they seem to be! David Cronenberg both wrote and directed this film. He was ahead of his time as far as gore was concerned, but more importantly, he had a great imagination! "Scanners" is one of those movies that shocks you if you let it. It's also a lot of fun to watch...

Rating:
Summary: Try not to think about it
Review: As is the case of most of Cronenberg's work, the plot of Scanners begins in a straight line, becomes murky, and then almost nonsensical, The Fly remake being the exception, but barely. That's not to say that Scanners wasn't enjoyable. The special effects really are what make the movie; the exploding head in the beginning has since become one of horror's greatest movie moments-it's that priceless. The acting, with the exception of Patrick McGoohan, is non-plussed and wooden, oftentimes just downright uninspired. Steven Lack has to be one of the most ironic and appropriate names for an actor that ever existed. At it's heart, Scanners is an action movie, there are plenty of scenes of tension that move the story forward; at no point will you feel very bogged down by exposition until you get to the ending, and then you will have whiplash from having had the whole story laid on you so fast. Many Cronenberg elements can be seen in this film: excessive violence, fatalistic outlooks from many of the characters, and Cronenberg's own patented pessimism, which seems to hover over every one of his films like a specter. Cronenberg is a marginal director, by that I mean that he doesn't take the easy road to get his message across to you. Many of his films are a lesson in hubris coupled with excessive power. Just don't try to take any of this with you when you watch Crash. There just was no excuse for that one. Enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I saw the cover for this movie and said to myself, "Hey, this looks kinda cool." So I rented it. Aside from the one guy's head exploding (one of my favorite scenes of all time) and the mind battle at the end, this movie didn't offer a whole lot. There was probably something wrong with the tape I rented, because it looked like the voices were dubbed, which also hurt this movie-watching experience. Still, the head exploding scene is great....

Rating:
Summary: One of my faves
Review: This is on my top ten favorite film list. The moody atmosphere, the questions of sanity, the secrecy and the mind war going on make for a plot that could be either convuluted or sublime. When I was looking at this film to review it, going through the other reviews tryign to see if there was anything new I could add, I wa sthinking about what a godo remake this could make.I'm not a huge remake fan my case in point being Gloria with first Gena Rowlands and then the remake with Sharon Stone which was essentially a mugging, much like my reviews of Jennifer Lopez's singing! lol
Scanners though, made Michael Ironside a stand out actor for me and Jennifer O'Neal I later saw in Cover Up on CBS with John Erik Hexum. The concepts dealt with here were pretty advanced for me as a chidl when I saw them in the movies but I'd been reading comic books so it wasn't that hard to follow. The head blowing up scene, is probably horror movie classic but what I liked most about this was the secrecy elements, te stealth, the slow unravelling of this whole mammoth conspiracy and it's reprecussions. Also this film is fair to both sides of good and "evil" here as it gets into advanced species dominance theories. There is no clear cut choice of whois right or wrong in teh situation teh scanners find themselves and the end of merging the two theories into one person is brilliant in teh sense of film representing a high concept.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing and overrated
Review: I honestly can't see what all the fuss is about. For years I've heard how Scanners was a classic piece of sci-fi, how it was David Cronenberg's first masterpiece. But when I sat down to see it I could only see small pieces of greatness drowning in a sea of a greatly overrated film.

Sure Cronenberg is a talented director, and Scanners shows his promise, but this story about people with telekinetic powers seems like it comes from a rough draft of a script without the ideas, plot and characters fully worked out. Almost as bothersome is the monotone acting by the lead, a newly recruited scanner sent to kill another attempting to take over the world. Though many have said the acting is intentional, it just came across to me that he was a very poor actor (of course, the DVD's badly dubbed voices could account for some of that). But more so, every scene seems as though it's still a work in progress, that the screenwriter (Cronenberg) ran out of time before production. It doesn't feel remotely closed to polished.

I admit that if I had seen this in 1980 when it came out, that it may have had a bigger impact on me. But I've seen plenty of sci-fi prior to this time that was leagues better then Scanners. I know I'll catch some flak for my unpopular view, but it's my honest, well thought out opinion. Of course I thought the "exploding head" scene was excellent in its shocking quality, the rest of the film just seemed to fall from there.

Scanners was a major disappointment for me, and though I know many disagree with me, I can't share their enthusiasm. It's worth checking out if only too see the exploding head, but, for me, is otherwise a forgettable film.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty Good
Review: This is a very intelligent horror film. It plays with your mind. Yes there is blood in it, but that doesn't detract from the films power, no far from that, it enhances the power of the film, and creates a very unsettling atmosphere. It's not for everybody though, but if you want something that'll mess with your mind, this is the one to see! Buy or Rent today!

Rating:
Summary: The most terrifying power - THEIR THOUGHTS CAN KILL !!!
Review: 10 Seconds... THE PAIN BEGINS.
This film is a real curiosity because it's a biological horror movie made for a mass commercial distribution. But far from making his cinematic art and vision softer than they were in his previous films, "The Parasite Murders", "Rabid" and "The Brood", David Cronenberg goes further, straight to the brain, the most complex and important organ in the human body. Even if here, the treatment is more on the level: the good against the evil. Four years after Brian de Palma's "Carrie", dealing with telekinesis, Cronenberg introduces us to another paranormal phenomenon.

20 Seconds... YOU CAN'T BREATHE.
A 'Scanner' is a person with a particularity: a dysfunction of the synapses in his brain, also called 'telepathy', the ability to mentally penetrate anybody's mind, to possess it. Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) is one of them, one of the most powerful, and the most ambitious. In some distance, he's able to make anybody do anything, included kill himself. During a meeting he gives a demonstration of his power, blowing up the head of another Scanner, one of the most famous 'gore' scenes ever shown on a wide screen. His ambition is take his revenge on the normal people who isolated the whole community of telepaths, who put it in some kind of a ghetto, and dominate the world. Only one person can do something about it: a Scanner as powerful as he is, maybe more. Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a homeless, disturbed man, is the one, and Dr. Paul Russ (Patrick McGoohan) is, with Revok, the only one to know about it. After some time of effective investigation Vale manages to mentally penetrate and destroy the heart of a big computer which contains a very important program about a medicine, the Ephemerol, supposed to shut down the power of the Scanners but also to create other Scanners, through pregnant women. The psychological fight between Cameron and Darryl can begin, even when Darryl reveals Cameron that they're brothers, and that Dr. Paul Russ is their father, who gave some Ephemerol to his wife.

30 Seconds... YOU EXPLODE.
This astounding movie, now a classic masterpiece, was n° 1 in America when it was released and it's not a surprise. If the story is not very innovative, we can't say the same about the way it's used and treated. To the usual fight between the good and the evil is added a reflection about genetical experiments from medicine men, and their eventual consequences in our societies. The script, well written and told, is very intelligent, the art direction and 'gore' special effects are perfect and the acting is solid. It's the first popular film Cronenberg has made, and along with his next release, "Videodrome", it's still one of his best and most original and curious. A rare piece of intelligent and efficient 'gore' cinema.