ameron Vale (Lack), a homeless man beset by voices, is in a shopping-mall cafeteria scavenging for food when a matron seated at a nearby table complains loudly about the kind of trash the management allows in there. He glares at her. She convulses and falls to the floor. Mysterious men in trenchcoats chase Vale and use an anaesthetic dart to take him prisoner.
Vale awakes in the custody of Dr. Paul Ruth (McGoohan), who informs him why he's always lived apart. He's a "scanner," or telepath, cursed with the ability to hear the thoughts of other human beings. There are only 237 known scanners in the world. Ruth has invented a drug that can help them control the volume. The bad news is that a powerful rogue scanner named Darryl Revok (Ironside) has formed a subversive organization intent on gaining control of as many of the 237 as he can, and assassinating the rest.
We see Revok in action during a demonstration held in an auditorium, as another scanner asks for volunteers from the audience. Revok raises his hand and agrees to be scanned. But he's more powerful than the poor shmo on stage, who trembles, convulses and sweats profusely ... before his head explodes, spilling a nice gloppy brain onto the clean white tabletop.
Dr. Ruth enlists Vale to track down and deal with Revok. Vale soon finds himself being scanned, at an art gallery, by a wistful young woman named Kim Obrist (O'Neill). Armed assassins slaughter Kim's friends. And an evil executive named Braedon Keller (Lawrence Dane), in league with Revok, plans a first strike at Dr. Ruth. ...
Aging thriller by a true master
A quarter of a century later, David Cronenberg is firmly established as a talented, artistic director of genre films, whose work resonates with a vision both bleak and visceral. Much of his work can be called great without fear of embarrassment.
At the time he directed Scanners, he was already responsible for two cult classics called Rabid and The Brood. But most people noticed him with Scanners, which owed much of its notoriety to that early scene with the exploding head. Even if they didn't see the movie, they saw its ubiquitous TV spot, an edited version of the moments immediately before the unfortunate skull went sploosh and was more than sufficiently clear about the sight that awaited any audiences brave enough to buy a ticket. (Viewers slow on the uptake may have been clued in by familiarity with a previous too-much-telepathy-leads-to-exploding-heads movie, Brian De Palma's campier but somewhat more enjoyable The Fury, released two years earlier and just as notorious at the time.)
Cronenberg went on to bigger and better films, including The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch. Scanners, which is not in the same class as any of those, does show some of the trademark chilliness that renders even the goriest Cronenberg film more than just an exercise in blood and guts; here, and afterward, characters all seem bundled up for an emotional chill as disturbing in its own way as his catalogue of terrible things to do the human body.
Much of that chill is provided here by Jennifer O'Neill, who projects a sad, hopeless loneliness as the terrified scanner Kim; she is never in love with Vale and may not even like him, but has nowhere else to turn and nothing more pressing on her agenda. She dresses in sweaters and knit caps and never looks warm, even for an instant. If any character in Scanners elicits any viewer sympathy, it's she. Certainly Vale doesn't. Despite his homeless background, he remains a cipher who never once establishes, in either word or demeanor, what he really feels about anything. And while it's possible for any talented actor to imbue underwritten characters with life, by the sheer power of his own performance, that task is well beyond Stephen Lack, who resembles a young Martin Landau by way of Tim Matheson but doesn't seem to demonstrate a fraction of either worthy's acting talent. His line readings are stiff, and his emotional palate, in this film at least, is limited to wide-eyed interest. Patrick McGoohan imbues his own role with presence but little else. And while Michael Ironside may have been the scarily intense villain of choice for any number of science fiction films over the years, for excellent reason, he has only two big scenes here.
What's worse, nothing between that exploding-head scene and the even more spectacular telepathic battle at the climax is sufficiently compelling to bridge the gap between those two jolts. Oh, there's a creepy visit to the studio of a sculptor who has a sort of conversation nook in a huge plaster head. And there's Vale's attempt to (telepathically) penetrate a computer network through its phone lines: a scene that may be dated today, given the quaintness of the technology, but which is probably one of the first-ever scenes ever to feature a fugitive hero hacking secrets from a mainframe belonging to the bad guys. (Oh, sure, it's a cliche now. But it was new then.) There are other good moments, here and there. But they're not enough. Too much of Scanners is taken up by the dull investigations of a underdeveloped protagonist without enough personal charisma to carry the narrative.
Incidentally, it's so far from being the film's fault that it seems churlish to point it out, but these days it's awfully distracting to hear McGoohan's character constantly referred to as "Dr. Ruth."
