Scanners Movie Review

‘Ephemerol,’ a sedative administered to pregnant women in the 1940s, has sired a generation of Scanners, mutant telepaths pushed toward madness by their own lethal brain waves. Scanner Ironside harbors Hitler aspirations for his band of psychic gangsters and goes about eliminating any opposition. David Cronenberg's sketchy script (inspired by the real-life birth-defect epidemic caused by Thalidomide) got attention, for good or ill, from Dick Smith's trendsetting, gruesome makeup f/x – most notoriously, a man's head exploded apart by telekinesis. Carnage aside, its a creepy freakout, low on characterization but with a perpetually pulsing soundtrack that may drive some viewers out of their own skulls.

1981 (R) 102m/C CA Stephen Lack, Jennifer O'Neill, Patrick McGoohan, Lawrence Dane; D: David Cronenberg; W: David Cronenberg; M: Howard Shore. VHS, Beta, LV COL, SUE