SCANNERS: THE SHOWDOWN
The low point of the series

  Do you even need to ask if a head is going to explode in this movie?

The Scanners series has been a surprisingly good one, with only one entry (part 3) that I didn't really enjoy so far.  That last one, Scanner Cop, would've gotten scarily close to top marks from me if its ending didn't suck like few endings have sucked before.  So I had some not-bad expectations for this one.  Alas, I was let down.

Our favorite scanner cop, Officer Staziak (Brad Dourif lookalike Daniel Quinn) is back, looking for his birth mother and being hunted by an old nemesis, Volkin (Patrick Kilpatrick) who's stopped taking his scanner-suppressant Ephemerol.  What's worse, Volkin has learned to absorb and power and skills of the other scanners he kills.  Along for the ride is a underground scanner-activist-chick (fire-maned fox Khrystyne Haje), who you know is here to basically just look pretty.

If I were a scanner, I'd be one fat bastard.  Constantly levitating beer from the fridge to myself, I wouldn't even get the marginal exercise afforded by the trip there and back to the couch.  And sure enough, our scanners do things with their minds you'd think they could do with their hands - like defusing bombs and driving.  How did Volkin get to be such a big muscular bastard, letting all his powers do the work for him?  Which do you think sounds like more of a pain in the ass - stabbing somebody with a screwdriver, or holding the screwdriver out while you relentlessly pull that somebody toward you with your scanner powers?  Guess which one actually happens.

Kilpatrick's and Quinn's performances generally consist of contorting their faces and looking intense while they exercise their powers.  Nobody else registers, except for Haje's hair.  At least the makeup and grue is pretty cool, with lots of people getting charred and having their skulls split open, courtesy of John Carl Buechler.

The plot manages to squeeze in a nice stack of cop-movie clichés as well - like when Staziak is called in to defuse the nothing-to-do-with-the-rest-of-the-movie hostage situation in the first act, and Staziak's inevitable romance with the non-police chick he has to work with.  The plot isn't as loaded with absurdities like Scanner Cop's was, but Scanner Cop at least didn't pad half the movie with agonizingly drawn-out scenes where the villain psychically torments people.

Also known as Scanner Cop II: Volkin's Revenge.  You'd be surprised how many sound effects in this movie sound like the sounds you hear playing Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II when you use your Jedi powers.  By the end of this movie, you're gonna get REALLY tired of those sound effects.

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