The psychic outcasts of David Cronenberg’s Scanners can perform a variety of cool parlor tricks with their advanced brains, including reading minds, starting fires, and hacking hilariously outdated-looking computers. But the most dramatic of their special powers has to be the ability to detonate craniums—a gift demonstrated in the film’s most famous scene, which is also probably the most famous exploding-head scene in all of cinema. In a demonstration gone horribly wrong, villainous volunteer Revok (Michael Ironside) grits his teeth, flexes his temples, and causes another Scanner’s noggin to go kablooey. The makeup team by stuffing a life cast of the actor’s head with miscellaneous stuff (including “leftover burgers”) and then shooting it with a shotgun. Originally designed to serve as the film’s cold open, the sequence was moved back a few scenes after shocked test audiences failed to really recover from it. Ultimately, Scanners is to exploding heads as Bullitt is to car chases: Other movies have gone bigger or more realistic, but none set the standard quite like this one. [A.A. Dowd]
