"Actor: Robert A. Silverman"

• Existenz | DVD | (25/03/2002) from £5.38   |  Saving you £4.61 (85.69%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Director David Cronenberg's eXistenZ is a stew of corporate espionage, virtual reality gaming, and thriller elements, marinated in Cronenberg's favourite Crock-Pot juices of technology, physiology and sexual metaphor. Jennifer Jason Leigh is game designer Allegra Geller, responsible for the new state-of-the-art eXistenZ game system; along with PR newbie Ted Pikul (Jude Law), they take the beta version of the game for a test drive and are immersed in a dangerous alternate reality. The game isn't quite like PlayStation, though; it's a latexy pod made from the guts of mutant amphibians and plugs via an umbilical cord directly into the user's spinal column (through a BioPort). It powers up through the player's own nervous system and taps into the subconscious; with several players it networks their brains together. Geller and Pikul's adventures in the game reality uncover more espionage and an antigaming, proreality insurrection. The game world makes it increasingly difficult to discern between reality and the game, either through the game's perspective or the human's. More accessible than Crash, eXistenZ is a complicated sci-fi opus, often confusing, and with an ending that leaves itself wide open for a sequel. Fans of Cronenberg's work will recognize his recurring themes and will eat this up. Others will find its shallow characterisations and near-incomprehensible plot twists a little tedious. --Jerry Renshaw, Amazon.com

• Scanners (DVD) | DVD | (08/04/2013) from £8.75   |  Saving you £7.24 (82.74%)   |  RRP £15.99

  David Cronenberg's Scanners is one of cinema's great horror films and features one of the genres most iconic scenes. Drifter Cameron Vale is plagued by incessant voices in his head, unaware that he is a Scanner, a group of people with extraordinary powers who can not only read minds but literally tear them apart. He is discovered by Paul Ruth, a scientist aiming to help his kind adapt to society. However, an underground movement of Scanners led by the psychotic Derryl Revok have other intent...

• Naked Lunch | DVD | (26/07/2004) from £25.00   |  Saving you £-5.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  You are now entering Interzone, William S Burroughs' phantasmagorical land of junk, paranoia and crawly things. Best travel advice: "Exterminate all rational thought". In David Cronenberg's superbly shot, unnerving warp on the Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch, the novelist himself becomes a main character (played in an implacable monotone by Peter Weller), with elements from Burroughs' life--including the shooting of his wife during a "William Tell" game, and bohemian friends Kerouac and Ginsberg--added to frame the book's wild visions. This is, ironically, a somewhat rational approach to an unfilmable book (and it makes a hair-curling double bill with Barton Fink, another look at writerly madness, with both films sharing Judy Davis). Cronenberg is a natural for oozing mugwumps and typewriters that turn into giant bugs, of course. But in the end, this is really his own vision of the artistic process, rather than Burroughs' hallucinatory descent into hell. --Robert Horton, Amazon.com

• Criterion Collection: Naked Lunch | Blu Ray | (09/04/2013) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A