Watched: Scanners

There is a great line in an MST3K episode where they watch a movie called The Final Sacrifice, extremely low-budget, synth-heavy, pseudo-apocalyptic fare that looks like it was filmed in the backwoods of someone's Canadian log cabin. One of the guys says something along the lines of, this movie has the bacony stench of Canada all over it! Which is true, because everyone's vowels sound funny and their diction's off and not to mention the whole thing is so cheap and holly hobby and CANADIAN. I'm not knocking this. I'm a big fan of Canada. Very pro-Canada. My mom more or less lives in Canada, and I'm very big on the people up there. But there is something about low-budget Canadian movies....

Anyway, David Cronenberg, despite utilizing actors who are wafting that faint bacony stench, manages to rise above both the Candianness of the picture and its low budget and makes some really memorable, gory, interesting stuff here. There's kind of a social commentary going on, about people living on the outskirts of society, but mostly there is just anticipation in-between scanner fights and head 'splosions, which is fine by me.

Also, Michael Ironside's villianous uber-scanner is named Darryl Revok, which is basically my new favorite villian name ever. And they say Revok approximately 6.8 million times during the course of this movie, so that was a good time all around.