Before we begin the review proper, let’s flash back to Pacific University, some time in May of 2009. I was watching Scanners for the first time while simultaneously packing up my dorm to prepare for graduation. Unfortunately, I figured that part of packing would be finishing off my leftover booze. Those who know me personally know that I have an extremely low alcohol tolerance, but I figured that the amount of rum I had left was small enough that I could finish it off safely. I was wrong.

To make a long story short (too late!), I sat through half the movie while blind drunk. Hell, I could barely see it, the room was spinning so fast. And when the movie was over, the liquor finally came back up and out. I had never been that wasted before, and it’s an experience that I’ve gone very far out of my way to avoid ever since. More to the point, I didn’t trust my drunken memories of the movie, so I stashed away the DVD and promised to see it again with a more clear head.

So yeah, this viewing was a long time coming. Maybe it’s because I had so many other movies to see first, maybe it’s because I’ve been keeping so busy, or maybe it’s because of that one bad memory, but I just kept putting it off for some reason or another. Until now.

I finally found the time to pop Scanners into my DVD player. And honestly — rare as it is for me to say this from personal experience — this movie really was better when I wasn’t sober.

For the uninitiated, the eponymous Scanners are freaks of nature who’ve started cropping up for reasons yet to be explained. Through comically strained facial expressions and shrill sound design, they have the gift of affecting people’s minds through a kind of telepathy. They also possess limited telekinesis. Alas, because the Scanners are completely unknown and misunderstood by society, and also because their powers tend to manifest in adverse ways when in groups, most Scanners are very anti-social and prefer to live hermetic lives. But of course, this doesn’t stop the military-industrial complex from taking an interest in them.

A weapons and security conglomerate called ConSec has invested untold amounts of time and money into studying the Scanners and applying them toward purposes of national security. That turns out like so. Yes, the famous “head explosion” scene was the result of sabotage by our villain, a particularly nasty Scanner named Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside). In response, ConSec’s resident Scanner expert (Dr. Paul Ruth, played by Patrick McGoohan) goes out to find and train a Scanner who might find Revok and stop him from taking his frustrations out on everyone in sight.

He ends up with Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a case of arrested development if ever there was one. Lack seems to play the movie’s hero with a kind of childlike innocence and uncertainty, which really does a lot for the character. It adds a new layer to the hero’s development through the movie, it sells the notion that Cameron really doesn’t mean any harm by his powers, and it makes him sympathetic. Very well done.

Aside from that, this movie leaves me at a loss. There isn’t much for me to analyze, because the movie speaks pretty darn loudly for itself. There are some nits to pick, however.

Take the famous head explosion scene, for example. The scene starts out brilliant, mostly because it happens so early in the film. Since we know so little about Scanning at that point, there’s no way of telling what’s going wrong or even if something is going wrong, until that grisly pay-off. It’s masterfully presented… until the explosion actually happens. After that point, the scene of the murder is not only clearly visible, but it’s also entirely clean. There’s no corpse, there’s no grey matter, and there isn’t a single drop of blood to be found anywhere. If that isn’t the most flagrant case of broken continuity in cinema history, it has to be up there.

Also, don’t get me started on the holes in logic. Revok forces a doctor to dose himself instead of Revok — in plain, point-blank view of at least three other guys — and no one seems to notice. There’s a ConSec traitor who’s working for Revok (Braedon Keller, played by Lawrence Dane), but it’s never made clear what he gets out of the arrangement. Cameron manages to sneak into a highly secure building, yet we never see how he does it. Oh, and let’s not forget the computer hacking sequence at the end of the second act that’s 100 percent pure bullshit.

But then there are the scenes of people spontaneously combusting or dying of cardiac arrest, hammily overacting through it all. There’s also the head explosion scene, of course, in addition to the equally bugfuck climax, both of which are scenes of psychic combat expressed through gore and viscera as only the warped mind of Cronenberg could deliver.

Scanners is one of those science-fiction films that takes pride in how weird it is. Don’t get me wrong, the science fiction high concept is beautifully presented and the plot (such as it is) is easy to follow. It also helps that though this film actually has very few special effects, what few there are were crafted with beautiful ugliness. On the other hand, this movie is still long on exaggerated acting and short on logic. Basically, this is a movie that has to accepted on its own terms, though the drink and/or drug of your choice may definitely come in handy.