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The third eye of evolution, the nosebleeds of revolution. Cain and Abel, out of the laboratory and into the Montreal arena, analyzed as corporate warfare in the dawn of the new decade. The young vagrant (Stephen Lack) turns his telekinetic powers on a snooty mall patron and finds himself strapped in an underground research chamber, convulsing before the gazes and thoughts of a crowd. The renegade frère (Michael Ironside) puts his brainwaves to megalomaniacal use while the pharmaceutical patriarch (Patrick McGoohan) does damage control. "We do not trade in fantasy and dreams." David Cronenberg's deadpan techno-thriller lampoon along the lines of De Palma's The Fury, a move toward the mainstream envisioned as a nervous system in full upheaval. The rebels gather for a séance summarily interrupted by shotgun blasts, a close-up of the commune leader (Jennifer O'Neill) screaming cuts to the invaders bursting into flame. ("Now I know what it feels like to die," she later quivers.) The hacking and scanning of a conglomerate computer briefly becomes a flickering Stargate sequence, ending with fireballs on both sides of the line and a phone receiver melting in the hero's hand. Watching from the sidelines is the Cronenbergian monster-artist (Robert A. Silverman), the "telepathic curiosity" hiding in a giant stone head in his expressionistic atelier. (He smiles and taps his temples: "My art... keeps me sane.") The psyche and its visceral spillage, the swirling gray matter that turns crimson before a stupefied audience, a Dalí gag (Tête Raphaëlesque éclatée). The poetically gruesome climax is a showdown of brotherly symbiosis, exorcised in the spectacle of thought melding into flesh—erupting arteries, incinerating torsos, blanked orbs and, as always with the auteur, a new beginning. With Lawrence Dane, Lee Broker, Mavor Moore, and Adam Ludwig.
--- Fernando F. Croce |