Movie Summary: Cameron Vale is jerked from his life as a mentally ill homeless man and whisked away to a corporate building. There he is given a drug that stops the voices in his head. He is told that he is not insane but he is one of only a few people with special mental powers. He is a Scanner. The corporation and its head scientist Doctor Paul Ruth clean up and attempt to train Cameron. They then send out an under prepared Cameron into the middle of a scanner war to track down a very powerful scanner who has plans to conquer the world.

My Opinion: Almost all the reviews for Scanners call it a Horror movie. I don't agree. To me Horror suggests movies like "Friday the 13th" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street". Scanners has some gore which more than likely is what gets it the horror label. I found it to be an Action Thriller with major SciFi elements. It's also a detective/spy type mystery film. It's all these elements together that make Scanners interesting and entertaining. The plot gets a little confusing in the middle as Cameron searches for other scanners, but our confusion mirrors Cameron's and is intentional. As things progress everything becomes clear. Stephen Lack is excellent as the weird scanner hero. I liked him enough to go look up what other films he has been in. Patrick McGoohan and Michael Ironside also give great performances. Overall this is a very entertaining movie that I will watch more than once and recommend to others.

DVD Quality: Video: Widescreen anamorphic - 1.85:1 Sound: DD 2.0 Mono. For at least the last quarter of the movie the sound does not sync up with the video. Extras: Trailer only. This is a bare bones DVD with Audio problems, but it is offered at a VHS price.

What You Should Do: Buy the DVD if you are a fan of this movie or of Horror/ScFi movies in general. It's not a high quality DVD release, but the price isn't going to make your head explode.

Related Movies To Check Out: Three Days of the Condor, Reanimator, Bride of Reanimator

Unfortunately I cannot comment on the DVD, as I have yet to get it. Although I am happy that it is finally getting the DVD Treatment!

Just saw this 1981 classic from the Cronenberg. Very scary and has some of those eecky scenes that the director is well-renowned for. I just thought after watching this film that this movie was so ahead of its time. I was born in 1981 and saw this today afternoon in 2001 and still enjoyed it immensely. Clever, gory, great score from Howard Shore (a little melodramtic at times but excusable considering the age of the film) and "Scanners" has Micheal Ironside in it as the most powerful Scanner of them all.

There some real memorable scenes in the film especially the one in the conference room when a scanning demo goes all wrong and the last act. I have seen "Scanner Cop," the spin-off of the original, and thought that film to be very good too. Highly recommended. Just not right for the squeamish...!

Though comments have rightly been made about the dated status of this movie (don't laugh at the incredibly slow typing speed of the computer engineers -- this was before the real Information Age!), Scanners hasn't lost its edge or intelligent menace.

Watch the sequels to see how much havoc was wreaked on this concept, and then you'll see the craft Cronenberg instilled into the horror sequences here. A suitable cast helps -- the strangely colourless Stephen Lack, who is an uninteresting protagonist in the beginning but turns out to be the exact thing the movie needed; Patrick McGoohan (who later won raves for his performance in Braveheart) adding a touch of authority and melodrama; and psychotic Michael Ironside. His final interaction with Lack, which I've watched about 30 times, succeeds on their respective intensity, a great Howard Shore score, impeccable editing, and on-the-mark special effects.

Put this one in your library as one of the most original and engrossing of horror and sci-fi movies, and bear it in mind should you ever venture into one of the sequels. The Christian Duguay-directed Scanners 2 and Scanners III made "Scanners" a shameful moniker, but the original holds up to any other horror classic, giving The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead, Freaks and Halloween a run for their money.

Lukewarm collection of stories, essays, and observations from Generation X's primary author and voice. The first part of the collection (the titular "Polaroids") consists of short vignettes involving Deadheads at a Grateful Dead concert, of which only "How Clear Is Your Vision of Heaven?" seems to be effective. In that tale, Columbia tells her young children a bedtime story (about an enchanted city beset by drought that continues on a downward spiral with the appearance of a skeleton) as they all bunk inside an Econoline van while Columbia's husband Ezekiel enjoys the concert alone.

The middle of the book is the best read. "Portraits of People and Places" is a collection of essays, letters, postcards, pictures, and rants about different places that Coupland has visited and experienced. His piece of Lions Gate Bridge is perhaps one of the best pieces I've ever read about Coupland. I loved the image he created with the trumpeter playing tunes for the gridlocked drivers/passengers while the suicide jumper teetered over the edge of the bridge. Coupland's descriptions of Palo Alto, CA, Los Alamos, NM, and Vancouver are magnificent. I've never been to these places, but Coupland effectively recreates them without much effort.

The final part is the "Brentwood Notebook," an interesting piece on suburban Brentwood, California, site of Marilyn Monroe's suicide in 1962 and the Nicole Brown Simpson-Ron Goldman murders in 1994, of which football great OJ Simpson was tried and acquitted in what has become the trial of the 20th century. Coupland goes through every detail of the suburb, from the fact that it is NOT an actual city, just a suburb, to details about nearby cemetaries and places of interests. A map would have been nice, however.

Overall, I have to give this one a three. The first part did nearly next to nothing for me. The middle was wonderful; the end was anti-climactic. The numerous photos helped, especially the cover photo of the beautiful actress Sharon Tate, who, within the book on pp. 14-15, eerily shares space with the man who had her killed, infamous murderer Charles Manson.

Douglas Coupland is at it again. Having probed the religious impulses of the post-boomer generation in Life After God and profiled the techie-geek subculture in Microserfs, Coupland now offers a series of short essays about the Deadheads and the lingering neo-hippie subculture of the 1990s.

However, only one-third of the book is about the Dead. The second section are snapshots of various people and places, ranging from young politicos in Washington, D.C., to musings on post-Communist East Berlin and the architectural landscape of Vancouver. The third section is devoted to a socio-philosophical analysis of the Brentwood community and its residents from Marilyn Monroe to O. J. Simpson. Here he provides his keenest observations on the poverty of wealth and celebrity, something like a Gen X version of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

While introducing several interesting themes regarding the nature of identity in what he calls a culture of "denarration," the reader senses that Coupland's latest outing is merely a hodgepodge of his random thoughts and observations. This book lacks the thematic coherence of his earlier works, primarily because this is a collection of articles and essays rather than a novel. The quality of his material varies widely from chapter to chapter, as if illustrating his own struggle to portray life as a narrative. This book, like life in general, has its good and bad days. Worth reading, but not Coupland at his best.

This is the Coupland book I've been waiting for; he's finally begun to fulfill his promise as a writer. Polaroids is experimental AND well crafted, whereas his previous works were either one or the other. This collection of meditations upon contemporary life--the Dead and the people who follow them, OJ, Kurt--are alluring both individually and as a whole. I highly recommend this book.