Scanners

Quite a few months back, TCM ran a night of movies on the theme of body horror. Unsurprisingly, if you're going to do body horror you would do well to include a David Cronenberg movie among the showings, and the movie TCM picked was Scanners.

The movie opens in what looks like a food court in a downmarket mall. A scruffy guy, Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) sits down at one of the tables. At a nearby table, a copule of women are eating, and one of them makes derogatory remarks about bums like this Cameron seems to be. But there's more to Cameron than meets the eye, and he starts staring at the woman to the point that she has a seizure! This comes to the notice of a couple of men who act like plainclothes detectives, chasing Cameron through the mall until one of them shoots him... with a tranquilizer dart. Cameron is taken to a converted warehouse, where scientist Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) informs him he's something known as a "scanner", a small group of people who have telepathic communities but have mental issues because they don't know how to deal with being able to hear everybody else's internal conversations. Dr. Ruth gives Cameron a drug called "Ephemerol" that dulls the other people's voices inside his head.

Meanwhile, at a company called ConSec which is obviously one of those evil defense contractor type companies that dotted conspiracy theory movies of the 1970s and 1980s, the executives also know about the scanners. But they have a rather more sinister plan, which is to use the scanners as weapons. They set up a demonstration event where they show what scanners can do, asking for someone to volunteer to be scanned. But what they don't know is that the man who volunteers, Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), is himself a scanner. Worse, he's more powerful than the guy scanning him, so the end result is that the ComSec scanner's head explodes in what is one of the movies most memorable sequences.

Guards try to chase Revok, but they don't have any nice tranquilizer darts or the like, so he's able to kill several of them in an extended car chase sequence. Dr. Ruth learns of all this and is horrified. But he also knew this was coming, which was part of the reason he was looking for Cameron. Apparently the belief is that Revok is not only a renegade scanner, but that he's looking for other scanners to join him in a plot to take over the world from the normies. And woe betide anybody who's a scanner but doesn't want to be a pawn in Revok's evil plot. Anyhow, Cameron's job is to infiltrate Revok's inner circle and take down Revok.

Cameron find an artist named Pierce (Robert Silverman) who is also a scanner, just in time for Revok's men to murder Pierce because Revok has obviously learned about Cameron and his being the second most powerful scanner behind only Revok himself. This also leads Cameron to Kim Obrist (Jennifer O'Neill), who is actively opposed to Revok and obviously in substantial danger because of it. Cameron and Obrist try to stay one step ahead of Revok while also trying to figure out exactly what's going on, which is rather more than Dr. Ruth has been letting on.

The idea of people with telepathic abilities fighting each other is an interesting one; indeed, it's something that had already been done in The Fury a few years earlier. The overarching plot of Scanners is frankly a bit silly, but this is the sort of movie that you don't watch so much for the plot, instead just sitting back and enjoying a ride through a dark and twisted world. That, and the special effects.

That having been said, I suppose that if Scanners had a more airtight plot, like, say, Alien, it might be remembered as an all-time classic and not just the interesting cult movie that it is. Either way, it's definitely worth your time to sit down with it and decide for yourelf just how much fun it is.