Scanners

Cronenberg delivers. Read full review

Scanners offers at least one literally eye-popping moment and another that can only be called mind-blowing. Read full review

Scanners is a memorable and absorbing genre entertainment. Read full review

The film is more interesting as a phenomenon than as a movie. [27 Feb 1981]

One of the most technically proficient of David Cronenberg's early gnawing, Canadian-made horror movies, though it lacks both the logic and the queasy sexual subtext that made his still earlier work - "Rabid," "They Came From Within" - so memorably revolting. Read full review

Unfortunately the plot thickens so rapidly and so lumpily that one very soon loses interest in spite of the quite stunning and gory special effects. Read full review

Scanners is a new horror film made with enough craft and skill that it could have been very good, if it could find a way to make us care about it. Read full review

The larger budget has given Scanners a high-gloss Hollywood look, the editing is occasionally elegant and the special effects, which consist mostly of imaginative ways of turning actors into meat, provoke from the audience the desired response ("Oh, yuk]"), but he is careful to keep the violence within currently accepted boundaries. [19 Jan 1981]