Universal Pictures Canada

From the beginning of his career, David Cronenberg has always dabbled in the weird and deviant, with a track record lesser filmmakers have surely envied. No one makes gooey, gory, and intriguingly psychosexual tales of body horror quite like him. Starring James Woods and Debbie Harry, 1983's "Videodrome" was his first movie backed by a major studio and a sizeable budget, which only pushed the macabre maestro to go even weirder than in his previous phantasmagorias like "The Brood" and "Scanners." Even from more than 40 years away, the wild script and exquisite practical effects feel like nothing else here, keeping the sci-fi horror fresh and uncanny while showing why it was ahead of its time despite the technical and technological limitations of the era.

The plot follows Max Renn (Woods), the smarmy and increasingly amoral CEO of a Canadian UHF television station called CIVIC-TV, a quite "out there" channel that broadcasts everything from softcore pornography to extreme on-screen…