Hoping to find something sensational to juice up his low-budget cable programming, sleazy station owner Max Renn (Woods) accidentally discovers a program called "Videodrome" while pirating satellite transmissions. Mesmerized by the show's perverse nightly premise — the apparent torture and death of a woman — he attempts to trace the program to its source. What he uncovers is a bizarre, sinister plot which might already have him in its psychic grip.

Leave it to Canadian horror maven Cronenberg to concoct a bizarre but intelligent paranoid chiller involving televisual mind-control, sadomasochism, and a mysterious leader named Brian O'Blivion. Cronenberg's cunning black wit and obsession with technology and flesh are in ample evidence, as we're treated to throbbing TV screens, oozing gadgets, and gruesome images of body horror. Woods is impeccable playing a man whose fetishes and voyeuristic tendencies in some ways mirror our own. Blondie singer Deborah Harry is also surprisingly strong as Renn's kinky girlfriend. Offering pointed lessons for a culture even more besotted with images of sex and violence today, this is a truly disturbing fable about the breakdown of reality in the media age.