Reception
The film received generally positive reviews. Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a rating of 80% fresh based on 40 reviews, with the consensus "Visually audacious, disorienting, and just plain weird, Videodrome's musings on technology, entertainment, and politics still feel fresh today." Metacritic gave the film a metascore of 60. It has been described as a "disturbing techno-surrealist film" and "burningly intense, chaotic, indelibly surreal, absolutely like nothing else". Leonard Maltin gave the film two stars our of four, writing, "Genuinely intriguing story premise… Unfortunately, story gets slower—and sillier— as it goes along, with icky special effects by Rick Baker." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film one and a half stars out of four, remarking, "The characters are bitter and hateful, the images are nauseating, and the ending is bleak enough that when the screen fades to black it's a relief… Videodrome, whatever its qualities, has got to be one of the least entertaining films of all time."
Videodrome opened on February 4, 1983. It debuted at number 8 on the box office charts, grossing $1,194,175 on 600 theaters with an average theater gross of $1,990. The film's widest release was 600 theaters and was in release for 10 days. It was a box office bomb, grossing $2,120,439 on a budget of $5.952 million.
Read more about this topic: Videodrome
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)