|
TRANCERS II (1991)
Offers about what you'd expect One of Full Moon's more exhaustively plundered franchises, the Trancers movies involved the adventures of future-cop Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) who travelled back in time to the present ("over the genetic bridge") to inhabit an ancestor of his to combat "Trancers", which are like...zombies, or something. Whatever they are, when they die they disappear in a red flash and leave only a charred, smoking outline behind. I saw the first four Trancers movies (there's been at least six) but except for this one, which I just saw, all I remember about them is that I liked the third one best. Deth is living more or less happily here in the past, married to a pretty lady (Helen Hunt!) and enjoying a relaxing, Trancer-free lifestyle. Expectedly, that doesn't last long. Trancers turn up, his boss from the future makes the same trip back to the present (and ends up in the body of a 15-year-old girl played by Alyson Croft), and Deth finds that his presumably-deceased wife (now in Megan Ward's body) is in the dubious care of Richard Lynch, who delivers scary/reassuring speeches from TV monitors and runs a mental institution so orderly that when the patients line up in the yard they leave spaces for people who escaped the night before. Somehow a washed-up alcoholic baseball player factors into this. Charles Band's direction is...sorry, I said direction. What it really is, is CLOSEUP CLOSEUP CLOSEUP CLOSEUP CLOSEUP holy shit, I've never seen so many close-ups. The script isn't much better - I still don't even know what a Trancer is, and there's like three scenes where Hunt walks in on Thomerson kissing Ward. There's no reason I should be enjoying this on any defensible level, but Thomerson is always fun to watch, and I liked the crafty vulnerability of Ward (even if she looks totally helpless with a gun, not very impressive for a trained Trancer-hunting agent) and the tomboyish charm of Croft. Lots of action, lots of gunplay, lots of squibs going splat. The charm of Trancers II is limited, but it's there. If you like this sort of thing. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE T's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |