THE ENGLISH PATIENET and SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE won best picture and were quickly forgotten. But SCANNERS is a major cultural touch-stone because it started the entire "psychic concentrates really hard on someone until the guy's head blows up" genre. It really started three years earlier in 1978 in Brian DePalma's THE FURY, and I suspect some kung-fu masters had already been making peoples heads explode in Shaw Brothers type Hong Kong movies, but the SCANNERS style "guy's head just flies apart like a watermelon dropped off a water tower" captured the public imagination, probably because it's a guy in a suit in a business setting, an image with which everyone accustomed to the head-crushing tedium of the modern meeting-culture could identify. Today we talk about exploding heads as shorthand for any sort of frustration or cognitive dissonance. Pretty good cultural penetration for a movie nobody saw when it first came out! (Thanks, cable TV.)

So hats off (so to speak) to David Cronenberg.

Cronenberg is one of the nine or ten greatest directors of the last half-century. I'd put him on par with David Lynch. For the first twenty-odd years his genius was not widely acknowledged because he insisted on making movies about really gross stuff and I think people were embarrassed to take him seriously. Over time, however, we became so blasé about gross, creepy bizarre stuff in movies that it became easier to see movies like NAKED LUNCH, CRASH, and VIDEODROME as the exquisite personal art and social commentary they are. (Today Cronenberg is universally admired on the strength of movies like A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and EASTERN PROMISES that are just as disturbing as his earlier films. The difference is that they are crime films, not science fiction or horror films. So his real critical handicap was as much genre as content.)

Scanners are super-powerful mutants who can read your mind or set your body on fire; now some of them are planning a global conquest, and only one scientist and a renegade "scanner" can stop them. Patrick McGoohan, Jennifer O'Neill and Lawrence Dane star in this sci-fi tale from David Cronenberg. 102 min. Widescreen (Enhanced); Soundtracks: English Dolby Digital mono, French Dolby Digital mono; Subtitles: French, Spanish; theatrical trailer.

Cronenberg's most paranoid film (which is like saying Shirley Temple's most sentimental film). So many haunting beautiful things. Dr. Brian O'Blivion, the genius who only exists on thousands of videotapes... Nikki (Deborah Harry from Blondie in her nudest role) the masochist Talk Show host who wants her breasts burned with cigarettes, and ends up living in James Woods' TV. the large vagina that grows in James Woods' stomach to provide a place to hide a gun, so he can become an assassin. and of course Viudeodrome itself, a sinister hypnotic satellite TV network that shows nothing but nude women chained to a mud wall being flogged against a soft clay wall. "Videodrome is dangerous. It has a philosophy"

Christopher Walken is Johnny, a man who's been in a coma for five years after an accident. He awakes into a changed world-his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) is now married, for one thing. As if things were not weird enough he finds that he can sense dire events in a person's future just by touching them. Learning that he can change the future as well, Johnny intervenes in a number of would-be tragedies and becomes somewhat famous, but he yearns for his former normal life. The strain of precognition makes him a bit shy about shaking hands, but at a political rally near his house a candidate for President (Martin Sheen, in a great over-the-top performance) does what politicians do best, and in that handshake Walken sees a horrific vision of Armageddon. What should he do?

"Exterminate all rational thought." Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs' hallucinatory, "unfilmable" novel is finally realized on-screen by director David Cronenberg. Part-time exterminator and full-time drug addict Bill Lee (Peter Weller) plunges into the nightmarish netherworld of the Interzone, pursuing a mysterious project that leads him to confront sinister cabals and giant talking bugs. The fruit of an unholy union between two masters of the hilarious and the macabre, Naked Lunch mingles aspects of Burroughs' novel with incidents from his own life, resulting in a compendium of paranoid fantasies and a searching investigation into the mysteries of the writing process.

"Naked Lunch, adapted by the dauntless David Cronenberg from William S. Burroughs' 1959 landmark novel, represents a remarkable meeting of the minds. It's hard to imagine another filmmaker who could delve so deeply into the monstrousness of Mr. Burroughs' vision, in the end coming up with a bona fide monster movie of his own. Yet while Mr. Cronenberg's ingenious approach to his material matches Mr. Burroughs' flair for the grotesque, it also shares the author's perfect nonchalance and his ice-cold wit. Seldom has a filmmaker offered his audience a more debonair invitation to go to hell." Janet Maslin, from "Drifting In and Out Of a Kafkaesque Reality"

I suspect the car crashes are a metaphor of the violent unpredictability of romances, but I could be wrong. Filled with strong sex scenes and jarring medical equipment. Without giving away too much. Spader and Holly Hunter's erotically charged first meeting is one of the finest (and most unsettling) moments in any film. DVD is technically excellent.