Seldom Seen review | REMOTE CONTROL
Perched as we are at the threshold of another shift in home video media, those old enough are encouraged to think back to the time when VHS really took off and mom-and-pop rental outlets ruled the rental roost (those too young, crack open your history texts). By the late '80s the VCR was ingrained in day-to-day life, bringing movies into our homes on our terms and allowing us to time-shift TV we'd otherwise miss. With a VCR (sometimes two or three) in nearly every household, the question of whether a technology so pervasive could endanger our well-being began to be raised. In director Jeff Lieberman's funky, high-spirited Remote Control, the VCR as an agent of evil is explored in a tale as much an ode to '50s sci-fi as it is a comment on the home video explosion.
The arrival of a campy sci-fi oldie titled "Remote Control" and its elaborate display rack signals a boom in rentals at a lavish So-Cal video store overseen by Cosmo (Kevin Dillon) and Georgie (Christopher Wynne). Spying on a regular customer (a cameoing Jennifer Tilly) lusted after by Georgie, the pair witness her murder and are picked up as suspects. Cosmo knows he saw the killer's image on TV at the home, but when the police check all they find is a copy of "Remote Control". Turns out the tape broadcasts a mind-altering signal and forces its viewers into a homicidal rage, which puts Cosmo and Georgie in a bad way when their police escorts try to kill them. Escaping, they track the source of the tapes and discover there's some real weight to the argument that media can influence those who ingest it, here on Earth and… elsewhere.
As he did with 1976's Blue Sunshine (where casual drug use in the '60s begat uncontrolled, chemically enhanced rage in the '70s), Lieberman here managed to tap into a prescient paranoid notion – what if a technology we were increasingly reliant on was turned against us? With Remote Control, Lieberman used the home video craze to show how pervasive technologies could be manipulated to make our lives anything but easier. Taken to a campy extreme in the context of the film, the idea still resonates, as does Lieberman's skewering of the now age-old complaint that horror and science fiction pictures warp the mind.
The film's design elements are a hoot. Clothing and hairstyles are straight out of '50s sci-fi hypotheses on what the future would look like, meaning most everyone's wrapped in shiny lamé and hairstyles are of a geometrically precise, physically impossible nature. Dillon (Johnny Drama himself, in the sort of out-there role you might expect to find in Drama's fictionalized past) certainly looks the part of the young rebel (a role he would again play in another homage to the genre's past, Chuck Russel's enjoyable '88 remake of The Blob) and Tilly's generally spacey disposition fits right in with the proceedings. The rest of the cast are a game lot who have fun with their roles.
Lieberman has long stated Remote Control suffered at the hands of its producers and has publicly denounced the film on repeated occasions. Whatever it's checkered past may be, it reps an enjoyable slice of '80s genre mayhem in any form and deserves a spot in the digital forever. A truly enterprising group might even consider tracking down Lieberman and giving his full impressions of the picture daylight, something a film that manages such a consistently engaging and clever tone in spite of its creator's misgivings deserves.
