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Videodrome

VIDEODROME
 
 
Videodrome  is a 1983 Canadian postmodernist science fiction body horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg, starring James Woods, Sonja Smits, and Deborah Harry.  Set in Toronto in the early 1980’s, it follows the CEO of a small television station who discovers a broadcast signal featuring extreme violence and torture.  Layers of deception unfold as he uncovers the signal’s source and loses touch with reality in a series of increasingly bizarre and violent hallucinations.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
I can’t explain why, but the purity and no-apologies tone of that quote by the Ugly about their rivals has really impressed me over the years.  Many times I have thought to myself that if (God forbid) I found myself in the hands of a gang of terrorists, sharpening their knives to lop off my head, the first thing I would say when they turned the camera on me would be:  “F--- the Viletones!”  Assuming I got another shot at the camera, I would then say:  “Death to Videodrome – long live the New Flesh!”  (That’s a line near the end of one of my very favorite horror movies, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome). 
 
(November 2011)
 
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My own Wikipedia handle is “Shocking Blue”, the name of a Dutch rock band that I have been particularly enamored with for several decades.  “That is not the name I was born with, that is my Wikipedia name.  Some day all of us will have special names,” as Brian O’Blivion might have put it; he is the “television prophet” who appears in the incredible 1983 David Cronenberg horror movie Videodrome that features among its cast members James Woods and Blondie’s Debbie Harry. 
 
(August 2012)