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Wow! Such a good movie.

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

David Cronenberg's Scanners is a very original and well made thriller that is a head exploding good time. This flick deals with people with special telepathic and telekinetic abilities known as Scanners. The government is studying them and there is a rogue Scanner that wants to use his powers to rule the world(Michael Ironside). Ironside is great here as baddie Darryl Revok and is one of my favorite on screen villans. While the film is classified mainly as horror, this has elements of sci fi and a high tech thrillers as well. Scanners is a pretty intense and cerebral film that delivers on suspense and gore. Along with other Cronenberg classics like The Brood and Videodrome, this is very much a thinking person's horror that is very original and effective that separates itself from a lot of dumb and generic slashers at the time. Scanners holds up well and is highly recommended to aficionados of horror and science fiction that haven't seen this. Excellent.

This film essentially begins with a young man named "Cameron Vale" (Steven Lack) walking into a mall to grab a bite to eat. However, there appears to be something terribly wrong with him which causes a woman sitting at another table to remark about it to her friend. Upon overhearing her comments the young man then appears to concentrate on her which causes her to go into a type of seizure requiring others to come to her aid. It's also during this time that other men enter the mall and after a short chase finally subdue the man and subsequently transport him to a secluded room inside a large corporate building belonging to a private security firm known as ConSec. Upon regaining consciousness he meets a man by the name of "Dr. Paul Ruth" (Patrick McGoohan) who gives him more information about his psychic powers and also warns him about another psychic named "Darryl Revok" (Michael Ironside) who has waged a deadly war on everyone like him. This prompts Cameron to join with Dr. Ruth to find Darryl Revok so that ConSec can apprehend him before he can kill anybody else. What nobody knows, however, is that Darryl has informants everywhere and is using them to eliminate everyone who comes into contact with Cameron. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this was a decent science-fiction film for the most part but it suffered from some scenes which were a bit slow and lengthy. That being said, I should probably mention that I watched the long version which was about 137 minutes and for that reason there were probably scenes which were allowed to continue without the editing found in the 103 minute version. On a similar note, I also didn't especially care for the ending which came off as somewhat ambiguous. But all things considered, I didn't think that this was a bad film by any means and for that reason I have rated it accordingly. Slightly above average.

I'm ashamed to say that I'm only now working my way through the Cronenberg "library" of horror. I'd seen The Fly, Videodrome and Naked Lunch in the past - and recently saw Videodrome again.Today, I saw Scanners for the first time. Yes, I've *always* known about that one scene - that's iconic.I have to say - and this is coming from a horror aficionado (I consider Carpenter's Thing, Jacob's Ladder, The Shining and The Changeling some of the best), Scanners is VERY VERY GOOD.It's got smart metaphors, subtle social criticism and great writing. I'm no fan at all of reboots - but I imagine this is an already very solid story that could be made even better by a remake. But ONLY if Cronenberg is in charge and keeps it's soul in the right place.If you're an intelligent horror buff, Scanners is a MUST SEE.Next for me... Probably The Brood or Shivers... :P

With Scanners, legendary Canadian director David Cronenberg made his most accessible movie up to that point in his career. It was so successful in actual fact that it was the number one movie in North America for a while. This mainstream acceptance was really only a pleasant side effect because Cronenberg had hardly watered down his style; he had simply moulded his themes into a narrative that happened to have a wider appeal. A happy coincidence more than anything. Whatever the case, this was the fourth feature film by this director that fell under the bracket termed body horror. This one dealt less with physical transformations, seeing as its plot focused on telekinetic powers, more specifically on a small group of social outcasts labelled scanners who had this highly unusual ability which allowed them to connect to another person's nervous system; the effects of this could range from mind reading to…head explosions! Of the latter there is one scene which was probably most responsible for making the film such a box-office draw, in it a scanner invades a victim's mind and literally blows his head apart. It an incredible, visceral scene and it remains one of the all-time great shock moments of cinema as a whole. It still looks highly impressive today and in a nutshell indicates the strong macabre imagination of its creator Cronenberg and the uncanny ability he had to come up with such unforgettably disturbing yet highly original visual ideas.I personally believe that Cronenberg's best films are his science fiction ones; these are the ones where all the ideas are his own and they feel the most original, successful and interesting. Scanners is simply another great example in this remarkable run of sci-fi horrors he knocked out between 1975 and 1986. These films were all very visceral and work really well as horror films but they also all had fascinating sci-fi concepts underpinning them which elevated them to a higher level still. Only Cronenberg would come up with the idea of a telekinesis film where a human would consider connecting their mind to a machine's nervous system. It's these kinds of left-field ideas which set him apart from others in the pack. Scanners is admittedly less disturbing than his earlier body horror films, yet it's hardly light-weight material, it is merely another step in a unique direction from one of the all-time great sci-fi and horror minds.The film benefits from a terrific acting turn from Michael Ironside who makes a great impression as the main villain of the piece. The central character is played by Stephen Lack who was a bit wooden unfortunately, albeit not damagingly so, in fairness Cronenberg chose him for the part mainly on account of his piercing blue eyes so perhaps it is not so surprising that his thespian abilities were less than stellar. There is also an appearance from Patrick McGoohan, although he seemed a bit bored to me but I don't know if that's just really good acting. More interestingly, there is also a welcome appearance by Cronenberg regular actor Robert Silverman as a scanner who has been cured by art therapy, he is once again very good value and makes a memorable impression.All-in-all, this is superior stuff from one of the true past masters of the medium. I would dearly love Cronenberg to return to his roots again one day to make another sci-fi horror film based around his own peculiar ideas. Whether that will ever happen again who knows but at least we will always have films like Scanners to return to again and again.