Please, for your sake and the sake of important film history, go out and rent the original David Cronenberg’s Scanners. It is definitely among Cronenberg’s best work and a smart horror classic. And do it soon, because it looks like the production of the Scanners remake is chugging along. Although the film is to be “directed” by the hack Darren Lynn Bousman (of Saw II) for Dimension films, there is some hope for the script penned by writer David Goyer (Batman Begins), who wants to take the original idea and place it in contemporary events.
"One of the things that's also great about Scanners was the fact that Cronenberg embeds so much subtext into his stories", Goyer told the Sci Fi Channel. "So we've tried to keep the spirit of that and kind of transpose that into a post-9/11 world, if you can imagine what scanners would be involved in, in that kind of world. That's what we're attempting to do here."
In the Cronenberg classic, telepathic and telekinetic “scanners” attempted to take over the world by exploding heads and other displays of telepathic powers. I’ll give Goyer the benefit of the doubt, his idea is interesting and it is encouraging that he holds the original in high regard; he’s even called Cronenberg a “genius.” Nevertheless, it’s still important that the original is seen and perhaps even revitalized.
"I'm a huge Cronenberg fan, and Scanners was definitely one of my favorite films as a kid", Goyer said. "What we're trying to do is take all the best elements of that. ... He obviously made it on a shoestring budget, so this time hopefully we can expand upon what he did.""
The film is scheduled for a 2008 release, so you have plenty of time to run to the video store to pick up the original or bump it up to the top of your Netflix queue.
