Scanners

People with telepathic and telekinetic ability exist because a sedative given to pregnant women in the 1940s produced them. A corporation is recruiting them.

Cronenberg shot it under enormous pressure with an incomplete script, writing pages each morning, which is visible in the structure and irrelevant to why it works.

The exploding head, achieved in one take by Dick Smith and Gary Zeller by loading a latex head with waste from a butcher and firing a shotgun into the back of it, is the most famous practical effect in horror.

Michael Ironside plays Revok as the most charismatic person in the film by some distance, and the final duel is achieved with makeup rather than opticals.

Underneath the effects it is another Cronenberg film about a company doing something to bodies and calling it medicine.