Really Awful Movies

There’s a website, Dog-Vision, developed by a Hungarian PhD candidate, which uses an image processing tool to show how dogs perceive objects.

It’s pretty cool seeing differences in visual perception and you’ll never look at your pet the same way once you understand how they look at you.

Bob Clark heralded in the era of horror POV via his groundbreaking Black Christmas, but in DOGS we get pet POV by way of introduction.

Even though the film stars a bona fide actor, David McCallum (The Man From U.N.C.L.E.), Dogs’ Wikipedia page is an exercise in extreme minimalism, currently devoting a whopping 21 words to this 1976 feature. (maybe the Wiki editor was thinking dog words are like dog years).

McCallum plays a caustic upstart biology professor, Harlan Thompson, a young genius who’s got a gift of gab. Upon meeting a colleague, who by way of small talk says to him, “our research has followed along parallel lines,” he retorts, “so we’re not supposed to meet.” (However in non-Euclidean geometry, parallel points DO meet at infinity. C’mon Mr. Genius, step it up!).

At this faculty drinks session, everyone laughs at a professor who shares a tale about being threatened by a German shepherd. Little do they know, foreshadowing and all. Woof woof.

Professor Thompson not only doesn’t have a capable enough grasp of math, he’s not much of an ecologist. When he’s called to the scene of a mysterious cattle attack, he flippantly tosses a beer can out the window of a rancher’s truck.

Meanwhile, a colleague back at the university, one Dr Fitzgerald, has been giving lectures to undergrads about pheromones, defined as “substances secreted to the outside by an individual and received by a second individual of the same species which elicits a specific reaction.”

After canines attack a group of youngsters at a dog show, the two academics put their noggins together and surmise that it’s olfactory chemicals which are to blame, as the dogs only attack in groups. And wouldn’t you know it? There’s some top-secret research going on in this university town. This comes by way of hilarious exposition when the dean calls for help from the state’s governor: “Yes, I know there is classified experimentation going on here!”

Dogs has some great lines in addition to that one like: “Let’s start a posse!” and “There’s an absolute limit to a size an insect can grow. Giant ants and scorpions are obviously products of ignorant screenwriters who never took biology.”

The coroner looks like serial killer Night Stalker Richard Ramirez, which is certainly odd.

Good mindless escapism, especially if you have a fondness for animal attack films.

*** (out of 5)

[CHECK OUT OUR ANIMALS ATTACK MOVIE PODCAST, FEATURING AN INTERVIEW WITH MIKE MAYO, AUTHOR OF THE HORROR SHOW GUIDE]

Scanners is horror turned inside out. And outside in. Thought crimes are reified, as a subculture of”telephatic curiosities” (aka, “scanners”) are able to use their brains to kill.

Scanners are social outcasts, unable to quell the voices in their heads and it’s this “loss of self” that is explored in what can be described as Cronenberg’s Mental Illness trilogy: Stereo, Scanners and Spider.

Not surprisingly, a sinister corporation with ties to a secret arms manufacturer is exploiting these beings.

That corporation is called ConSec and they’re going after one of their powerful rogue agents, Revok, the only way they know how: enlisting the help of another scanner, Cameron.

But Cameron doesn’t come willingly.

ConSec’s lead researcher Dr. Paul Ruth kidnaps, then injects him with a telepathy inhibitor, Ephemerol, a Haldol analogue that ameliorates his harrowing cascade of voices and gets the scanner subject on board with the plot to take out the company renegade.

“How can you develop a self with all those voices?” is a question asked first of the telepathists in Stereo then continued here, as Cameron infiltrates the scanner underground to find Revok, who, like the test subjects in Stereo, has attempted to self-medicate via frontal lobotomy, the results of which leaves a small scar between the eyes.

A common complaint made by those suffering mental illness is, “I’m not myself,” and questions about the self is one that’s plagued philosophers since antiquity.

Reductionists like Sam Harris say the self is illusory, a wholly subjective experience that’s not as it seems, echoing what David Hume said…basically that since no impression is a persistent thing, there cannot be a persistent self. This is ratcheted up 1,000-fold when the beings are experiencing hundreds of impressions simultaneously and that much more intensely.

Like Videodrome, Scanners touches on the concept of how “two nervous systems connect, separated by space.” In the former, Max Renn’s physical body eventually morphs into a digital cyborg after trying to track down a media oracle who already exists in this state.

In Scanners, the title “freaks” put their connecting powers to the test against volunteers at ConSec headquarters. First, it’s in the form of an audience member who it turns out has similar scanning powers and is responsible for the film’s most infamous and audacious scene, produced “with a shotgun and Kosher salt.” (Definitely watch the mini-doc about how Scanners’ exemplary special effects were done).

Second, Scanner abilities are tested against a yogi in a battle of, well, heart versus head. The yogi has the ability to lower his heart rate at will, but Cameron’s though waves induce tachycardia in a terrifying scene.

Finally, Cameron is tasked to battle a supercomputer to match mental wits with the ultimate expression of human ingenuity. After all, human thoughts, and by extension, “the self” is nothing but higher order cognitive functioning and electrical impulses at the end of the day, if you’re in the business of soul-denying materialism.*

One of the most ambitious horror films of all time, Scanners is a bona fide classic, which has too many subtextual issues to delve into fully here. However, as other reviewers have pointed out, what detracts from the overall story is the detached, procedural aspect of the film, which Cronenberg doesn’t handle as adeptly as he does the film’s awesome central conceit and explosive body horror. It could be summed up thusly: more dying, less spying.

**** (out of 5)

[As Aquinas famously put it, “For those with faith, no evidence is necessary; for those without it, no evidence will suffice.”]

[CHECK OUT OUR PODCAST OF VIDEODROME HERE]