"Long live the new flesh!"

If you've read this blog before you already know how it works: every week I seek out the weirdest, grossest and most perverted movie that streams online and tell you about it so you can enjoy it in the comfort and convenience of your own home. It's become more of an obsession than a pastime for me, but I've got nothing on the main character in the movie I've got for you this week.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Videodrome.

David Cronenberg directed this gory, balls-trippy, psychosexual suspense-thriller in 1983, the same year he directed The Dead Zone. James Woods plays Max Renn, the executive of a small, independent cable channel that specializes in sex and violence. He's looking for the next big, sleazy thing. He employs a video pirate named Harlan (Peter Dvorsky), who finds him a show called Videodrome, which is a single, unedited, hour-long shot of someone being tortured to death. He wants to track down the people who make the show so he can play it on his station.

The best part? The show gives you a brain tumor that causes hallucinations.  One night in an especially paranoid state, Renn sits up late watching videos with his gun, and a big vertical slit opens up in his belly. If you said it reminds you of a vagina, no one would say you're terribly off-base. Renn sticks his pistol in there.

Debbie Harry from Blondie plays Nicki Brand, a radio host who helps troubled callers. She's also a masochist. After meeting Max on a local TV talk show, they go out, they go back to his place. They watch Videodrome. She's into it. She wants to go audition. He tells her to stay away.

After that it gets really twisty, a little tough to follow, and even tougher to summarize. It is one weird flick -- weirder than The Dead Zone, weirder even than Scanners.  It's never clear if the action is really happening or all part of Max's hallucinations. The line between what's real and what's TV and what's in Max's head gets a lot fuzzy and that's deliberate -- part of some grander statement about our relationship with television or pornography or something. I'll let you write your own dissertation and tell you that Videodrome streams on Starz.