For now.
The Criterion Collection is cool. Its mission is to gather the greatest movies from around the world an publish them in the highest technical quality available. Predictably, a lot of their movies are highbrow, art-house fare, but every once in a while, they snag up a weirdo. The movie I want to tell you about is just such a movie.
This week's Thursday Thriller is Scanners.
David Cronenberg directed this 1981 film about a bum named Cameron Vale (Steven Lack) who was cruising a shopping mall for table scraps one day when he could hear in his mind from across the food court what an awful, old woman was saying about him. He stares at her and she starts to have seizures. Then these two guys in much cleaner overcoats, chase him down, shoot him with a tranquilizer dart, and drag him away.
Meanwhile, a guy in a moustache addresses a theater of people and tells them he will scan them, in other words read their minds, one by one. Michael Ironside plays Darryl Revok, the psychic's first volunteer and what happens next is one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of cinema.
Then Vale wakes up and meets Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) who explains the reason he's a bum is because he's a scanner, a kind of weaponized psychic. Ruth gives Vale his mission, which is to track down and stop Revok, because he's building his own army of scanners.
It's a lot like The X-Men, except way stranger and everyone has the same powers.
Of course, you can't just track down and kill the world's most powerful mind-reader. He knows you're coming and sends people to get you first, which means Mr. 'Splodey-Head must not have been a very good scanner. He really should have seen that coming.
Scanners is a lot of fun. Come for the head explosion, stay for the scrunchy-faced concentration. It streams on Hulu Plus.
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