A Mutant

GOING TO the movies today gives one the feeling of being an unwitting contributor to a Hollywood Slice-N-Dice-a-Thon. The Saxon theater, the cheesy upstart of the Sack line, fills its lobby with horror film posters. To the left, a nubile woman is undergoing a tracheotomy by cleaver, and to the right, half-naked women cringe in terror as an ax-murderer emerges from the shadows.

Inside, the Saxon's Gothic architecture and broken seats fit well with a string of trailers slowly parading across the screen. There's good, clean, big-budget fun with The Final Conflict--hopefully, the last of the Omen pictures. The next preview heralds the return of The Texas Chain Saw Massacres, a picture ahead of its time. This trailer's teaser scene shows a raging lunatic perfecting his gasoline talents on a man in a wheelchair--straight down the middle. But that film's creator has a new surprise for us--Funhouse. Opening this week, Funhouse features a deformed killer who "lives off the flesh of young innocents." Last but not least is a young woman turning into a green, pulsating, nine-foot-tall wolf-pig in The Howling. Now that's entertainment.

DAVID CRONENBERG'S $5-million opus, Scanners, now unreels. Cronenberg has long been one of the premier horror-film directors in the world. His earliest success--They Came From Within--updated George Romero's Night of the Living Dead by making the villains brown, turdshaped creatures who neatly slipped in any out of any available human orifice. In The Brood, his 1979 entry starring Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar. Cronenberg realized a brilliant and original idea. Doctor Reed develops a radical psychological treatment that enables his patients to manifest, physically, their traumas and neuroses. Eggar, his star warped patient, grows living, breathing children off her chest. These faceless perversions, products of her illness, band together to destroy anyone who might upset her delicate psyche. That's the kind of idea that turned Cronenberg into a legend. Avco Embassy subsequently offered Cronenberg his first chance to direct a solvent picture.

Scanners looks like big bucks, but it doesn't seem much like The Brood. Cronenberg admitted recently that Scanners is not especially deep and should be interpreted as his "fun entertainment picture." Where his previous films boldly advanced the language and style of the standard "scare 'em" thriller, Scanners retreats to cliche.

The film has the world littered with 256 "scanners," people who telepathically link with another person's nervous system. Darryl Revok (Lawrence Dane), a bad scanner, tries to form an underground league of scanners who will overthrow the U.S. government and establish "a civilization that will be the envy of the world." Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a good scanner, is abducted by Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) so that he can be trained to search out and destroy Revok. Mutant takeover of the world is hardly an original idea, but the main plot pales when compared to the staggering number of inanities Cronenberg pours into the film.

THE BIG SELLOUT results from the promotional exploitation of the use of this telepathic ability. Scanners can give pain to the person being tapped, can literally blow him to bits by holding on long enough--a good little shock. Similar techniques were featured in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Brian De Palma's The Fury. The latter used the effect most spectacularly, with ten camera angles, when John Cassavettes turned to ripe tomatoes all over the dining room walls. But Cronenberg is a terrible director when it comes to shocks and thrills. He uses this effect once--at an anticlimactic moment, thus short-changing core fiends and shock jocks.

Other tidbit wastes include Jennifer O'Neill's performance, given top billing in the credits. She enters the film about halfway through the picture as a good scanner. She spends the remaining 50 minutes hiding in corners and looking concerned. And those are her strong points.

Stephen Lack or Lawrence Dane cannot act any better. But they say some unintentionally funny lines, like Dane's "I'm gonna suck your brains out!" Neither one has motivation or personality. Lack has a cherubic expression on his face, and his lines issue forth like ripples on the Dead Sea. At least Dane can sneer with the best of them, and that never hurts in standard garbage matinee.

THAT'S THE PROBLEM. Cronenberg isn't a two-bit avaricious director; he's the best. And Scanners, an almost immediate sellout, must certainly be his worst film.

But touches of talent remain; for example, we're shown a film of Revok as a young man in a mental institution, in which he has just tried to drill a hole right between his eyes to let the "strangers" out.

Then there's Benjamin Pierce, another scanner, who has managed to keep his sanity by expressing his scanner-related anxiety in his sculpture. The scenes at Pierce's exhibition and in his private studio are the film's most powerful moments. Expressionist figures contort and silently scream, communication more about the life of a scanner than the rest of the movie. Cronenberg understands that kind of horror. He can translate the internal and intangible into something real and terrifying.

Scanners, however, contains few of these tantalizing touches and much that's standardized and regressive. The Saxon theater management had the right idea after all. Scanners can be lumped together with cut-rate, ketchup-and-hamburger fare like The Texas Chainsaw Massacres and The Final Conflict because its appeal is so clearly limited by its lack of ambition.