The mind takes over in David Cronenberg's commercial breakthrough, though not without corporeal spillage -- Michael Ironside volunteers his brain at an ESP seminar, only to telepathically turn the tables and gorily detonate the host's noggin. A scanner, gifted with pulverizing mind control, and the renegade leader of an underground movement bent on world domination, megalomania leaking out of the hole he's drilled into his forehead; on the other side is Stephen Lack, untainted scanner and unsalted, early Cronenbergian hero, scooped from the gutter to become an infiltrating agent. That they turn out to be brothers is no spoiler once Cronenberg's structure as a retelling of Abel and Cain becomes clear, "telepathic curiosities" birthed as side-effects from the experiments of Patrick McGoohan, a callous scientist-patriarch allowed but one moment of incriminating clarity before being dispatched by the ruthless weapon organization that employed him. Despite the gooey blast-off near the start, viscera is downplayed for the modernism of sterile interiors, sleek edifices, corridors -- the father's institutionalized home base is corporate conspiracy modulated from the '70s. Still, brutal brainwaves bloody up nostrils, fetuses scan from within the womb, and the fusion-hacking of Lack's nervous system with a computer's precipitates a meltdown -- as with The Fury, De Palma's own mind-over-body freak-out, it's a move toward the mainstream only superficially. (The plot-pushing momentum, studded with poetic dissolves, finds room for Robert Silverman as a scanner-turned-sculptor, lounging inside a gigantic grimacing head to explain his, and the filmmaker's, monstrous philosophy: "My art keeps me sane," while tapping his temples.) Jennifer O'Neill is around, presiding over a hippie-scanner commune ready to be blown to bits, though the main pas de deux is between Lack and Ironside, locked in a brotherly symbiosis to be exorcized in the spectacular climax of thought melding into flesh -- arteries bulging and erupting, self-immolating torsos, blanked-out orbs and, as always with Cronenberg, a new beginning. With Lawrence Dane.
--- Fernando F. Croce
|