I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Pretty Good

Excellent but underrated film

Admirable film.

Central plot was intriguing. Man discovers he has telekinetic powers, gets recruited by company to harness his powers in a fight against a rival organisation (run by an uber-telekineticist). Investigations, mind-games, confrontations and action ensue.Despite the decent plot, it feels rushed towards the end. Final scene comes out of the blue.Two things stopped this from being a much better movie, and potential sci fi classic. Firstly, the performances are horrendously bad. There is hardly a credible performance to be seen. Patrick McGoohan and Jennifer O'Neill are probably the best of the lot and they're just so-so. Stephen Lack is pretty dull in the lead role, and Michael Ironside goes in the opposite direction, overacting as the bad guy.Furthermore, this movie contains some of the worst bit-part acting you'll see in a mainstream movie. eg The guy who falls backward before being shot!Second negative aspect: the production. Everything seems cheap and B-grade. Worst of all is the sound. It feels as if the dialogue was dubbed into the movie, and not synced very well with the actors' lips - it's that bad.Overall: reasonably entertaining and not a total waste of time. Plus you get to see the famous exploding head scene...

What are Scanners?Scanners are freaks of nature, born with a certain form of ESP; able to control minds and damage bodies at their will.Scanners is a mysterious, brooding film with good cinematography and a dark atmosphere to keep it going. Maybe I expected too little of this; I thought it was just going to be a fun B-movie from the 80's, which it is. But yet it feels more than that. I think this film is a lot like Inception and the original Highlander movie, a mysterious film that quickly unfolds over the course of the film. At the start, we see a man eat some leftovers from a table, and an old woman is seen gossiping insults about him. The man stares at her, and suddenly she goes into a major seizure. Suddenly, men in suits start chasing after the man through the mall, and you ask yourself, who are these people? What's going on?! The entire film is like this one scene, which is what makes this such a masterpiece. David Cronenberg should be proud of this achievement he made in 1981, a suspenseful, eerie and mysterious film that never loses it's own grip on the pacing. Overall, because of the greatness of this film, I just had to rate it a 10/10. An absolute masterpiece, recommended.

This is a passable sci-fi story, but only if you're willing to overlook many of the internal inconsistencies. For example, Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) and Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) were both born under the influence of a synthetic drug called ephemerol, but Vale wasn't aware of it while his older brother was. So Vale goes his entire life not knowing who his parents were or where he came from, and with no childhood memories. Why wouldn't he have questioned his existence a long time ago? Or how about that business of Vale linking up his own nervous system with the nervous system of a computer? Really? How does that work? Oh yeah, over a phone line. See, I was paying attention, but that was just a bit too esoteric to grasp for this viewer, who manages to think about these things while watching a movie. Perhaps David Cronenberg, who wrote the script as well as directed, could have consulted with Captain James T. Kirk on how to effectively initiate a self destruct sequence on a computer program; Kirk did it more than once in his 'Star Trek' series run.Say, here's another one - early in the picture it was established that ephemerol can disrupt a scanner's telepathic ability, but near the end of the story, it's stated by Revok that ephemerol imparted scanning ability to unborn children still in the womb. Having it both ways seems like a contradiction in terms, but maybe I'm just overthinking the whole concept. Best thing for me to do at this point is take a biocarbon amalgamate and see a doctor in the morning.

It's got atmosphere, but lost potential, good ideas, fx are good, but one of the worst actor ever.I saw this movie in the theaters back in 1981. It has one of the best near open scenes with the head exploding and a very good ending with the dueling scanners. It's got great atmosphere. Decent music. Very good acting from the doctor/father and the bad scanner.Here's the big problem. 1) The good scanner is one of the worst and most monotone actors on the planet. I'll give him an "A" for showing up to work, but this man cannot act. 2) The middle section is very slow. 3) Obvious problems, like in the opening scene with the head exploding, the wide shot shows no body or blood on the table. The van scene is shot like crap, it's moving so slow. 4) The cinematography is crap, just basic shots, like no thoughts went into it. 5) The dialogue was crap. Towards the end when the doctor sat down thinking just before he got shot was interesting, but it didn't work. 6) The female lead was introduced very late in the movie and she did very little and her acting was OK, but not great.The beginning and ending makes this movie. It is a missed opportunity. It needed more work. Very unfortunate. My rating is B-, or 6. I will give it a 7 because of the beginning and ending.