Videodrome

It predicts most of what people now say about the internet, using a Betamax slot in a man's abdomen.

Max Renn runs a small cable channel that shows soft pornography and violence. He finds a pirate signal apparently transmitting real torture from Pittsburgh and starts chasing it, and the film's grip on what is happening loosens deliberately from about the halfway point.

Rick Baker built the effects, including a breathing videocassette and a television that swells toward the viewer, and they are practical, wet and heavy in a way nothing rendered has managed since.

Debbie Harry is very good and the film uses her the way it uses everything, as an image that may not exist.

Universal did not know what to do with it and it lost money. The line about the new flesh has outlived the format it is about by four decades.