Max Renn (James Woods) is a television program producer for CIVIC-TV who is in need of new shows. When he goes looking for edgy material for his sleazy UHF TV station, he and his assistant Harlan (Peter Dvorsky) stumble across the pirate broadcast of a hyper-violent torture show called "Videodrome". Max tasks his supplier, Masha (Lynne Gorman) to find out the nature of the show. She returns to tell his that the shows are real and the murder, torture and death equally real. As he struggles to unearth the origins and reasons for the program, Max's depraved girlfriend Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry) travels to Pittsburgh to "audition" for the show. Max with the help of a media prophet Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley) embarks on a hallucinatory journey into a shadow world of right-wing conspiracies, sadomasochistic sex games, and bodily transformation.