Scanners

I was pretty disappointed. It's more of a step down than a step up for Cronenberg; it seemed like he was sacrificing his vision to make a mainstream-friendly film. As a result, the film is basically a bunch of great scenes strung along by a generic, rather lame plot and some truly terrible performances. Even so, those scenes - the exploding head, the phone line stuff, the final battle - are so fantastic and so memorable in their own right that they make it worth getting through everything that comes between. Just a brilliant combination of sound and image in those sequences. So, overall, the film is nothing great, but it's not a complete wreck, either.