Scanners
If you're a fan of science fiction movies, there are certain directors that you should be familiar with: Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Paul Verhoeven, and James Cameron immediately spring to mind as names you should recognize. Another name that serious fans of the genre should recognize is David Cronenberg. Cronenberg delivered us some of the best sci-fi movies of the 80s: Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, and The Dead Zone are all his handiwork. But before all these, there was 1981's Scanners. The movie is a little slow by today's standards and one of the plot devices is laughably bad, but it's still worth watching. There's just enough action to keep things interesting and the minimalist electronic score is incredibly eerie. The premise is this: out of the 4 billion people on Earth (when the film was shot in 1979), there are 237 known scanners. These scanners are people who have the strange and wonderful ability to print out copies of photographs and documents. Wait, wrong. They're people who have telepathic abilities ranging from the ability to control other people's minds to the ability to squeeze the blood out of other people's veins. As one might imagine, this ability can be used to do all sorts of morally ambiguous things. Scanners is the story of an epic battle between the evil telepaths and the non-evil telepaths. I hestiate to call the less malicious scanners "good" because the use of their abilities is a massive invasion of privacy on the most personal level, no matter what cause it is used for.
Meet Cameron Vale, a blue-eyed vagrant with a haunting stare. And when he starts in with the staring, you better run like hell because bad shit about to happen. That stare can give old ladies seizures and speed up yoga masters' hearts to dangerously fast speeds. Up until this point in his life, Cameron has gone through life staring at people and unintentionally causing trouble because he hears their voices in his head. These voices have ruined his life because he is unable to focus his attention and hold a job. Hey, let's see if you can figure out whether Cameron is the main villain or the movie's primary protagonist. Go ahead, take a guess. If you guessed that he's the bad guy, then you're wrong. That's right, the movie's hero is a creepy homeless guy who hears voices in his head. Isn't that great?
Our story begins in one of the places top five places where you're most likely to find poor people: show me mall food court! Cameron wanders around the food pavillion bumming food and smokes from people until he finds an empty table with a half-eaten hotdog. Being the classy guy that he is, he picks it up and eats it. As fate would have it, two hideous middle-aged ladies see him do it and start making fun of him. He stares at them and one of them starts shaking and screaming and shit. At the point in the movie, the existence of scanners has not yet been explained, so the viewer might assume that the lady is going through an extremely difficult menopause. As the woman thrashes about, people in the food court start to take notice and begin to wonder what the hell is wrong with her; now she will know how it feels to be stared at.
Oops, now you've been tranked. Sucker!
