So there’s this place downtown called “The Film Lab” that’s kind of a combination craft cocktail bar and movie theater — you buy tickets to a showing of some old classic movie, and then sit at tables and drink cocktails. They’re still very clearly in a Covid mentality, so they’re doing this out on a patio (with proof of vaccination required!), which means projecting the movie on a screen on the side of a building, and giving everyone headphones to listen to the thing.

It’s cool, and works well (at least when the weather is nice, which it was yesterday), with about the only downside being that they use QR codes to order drinks, and after it gets dark, the phone can’t even see the QR code to scan it anymore. I suspect we’ll be back again.

But anyway, this movie is maybe mostly known for its Cronenbergian body horror (and given that it features a very phallic flesh gun and a stomach vagina, for good reason) and weird kinky sex shit. But the real core of the movie is its focus on the perils of technology, with a kind of cyberpunkian Snow Crash-style TV broadcast that, once seen, infects your mind — the plot of the movie follows the producer of a sex-and-violence underground TV station who watches the Videodrome broadcast and then has his life descend into madness.

I suspect this is a movie that works better today than it did then, because at the time it was released, it would have felt like it was being weirdly mystical about mundane workaday technologies — CRT TVs and VCR tapes — whereas now it’s talking mystical about these vanished techs that nobody has seen in decades. The movie is really emphatic about the physicality of televised content, and I think it helps it that today we notice the bulging curve of a CRT and the chunkiness of a VCR tape in a way an early ’80s audience might not have.

I don’t think the movie is completely successful — it raises more questions than it answers, and sets up more situations than it resolves. But it’s never boring, and the dystopian retro-future analogpunk aesthetic melds well with the Cronenbergian body horror eroticism aesthetic to create something memorable and unique.