Fair use: no free alternative is readily available to identify the work; this article provides critical commentary on the film in question.
Once again the Criterion Channel has nonchalantly delivered a smash hit I’d otherwise have had no hope of discovering. Ironic perhaps, given the centrality of video clerks and their recommendations to Jeff Lieberman’s Remote Control (1988). Another win for streaming’s best service, in any case.
At the most superficial level, this one is just a rip-roaring good time. 80s cheese as its finest. Naked sex freaks whipped to death by women in 50s sci-fi get ups; Japanese VHS-company middle-managers hellbent on world domination; stunt people on fire; squibs—there’s a smorgasbord for the ravenous viewer. At first glance, the plot is understandably thin. A video store clerk named Cosmo (Kevin Dillon) uncovers an alien plot to use a tape called Remote Control to turn human beings into murderous maniacs. He sets out to stop the interlopers and get a girlfriend along the way.
But what makes this one so captivating isn’t just that it’s fun. You’ll note that the videotape is called Remote Control, the title of the film itself. The tape within the movie presents a few minutes of 50s sci-fi wizardry. A couple remark on the wonderful technology of the 1980s—such as an automatic toothbrusher—until the woman becomes entranced by some alien signal. Just as the tape holds on her wide-eyed gaze for a few seconds, the movie becomes a mirror. Viewers see themselves. They hear their own name, repeated ad nauseam, driving them to kill.
Our Remote Control opens in the same way. In this case, an 80s couple watches the tape while donning 50s sci-fi outfits for a sexual escapade.
Remote Control’s style reflects the time ambiguity of the tape within it. Each character and set looks simultaneously 80s and futuristic; it’s almost as if the film itself takes place in an imagined 2010s, 30 years out from when it was made, much as the tape does with the 50s and the 80s. All video-store displays for the movie within the movie feature a large mirror, which characters keep reminding us passers-by can’t help but gawk at. The mirrors are uncharacteristically unclear; they refract and distort the viewers’ visages. Yet, they can’t stop looking.
The film, in other words, acts as a Russian nesting doll. We are watching the movie taking over the world, which is itself a presentation of a movie taking over the world. Today, we too will stare into our TV (or phone!) screens until kingdom come. We too occupy a present that is at once optimistic about future technology and hopelessly lost to its own vanity and greed.
Plus, you know. It’s a fun B-movie.
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