David Dubrow

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Movie Review: Trancers 5: Sudden Deth

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(Interested readers can see my review of Trancers here, my review of Trancers II here, my review of Trancers III here, and my review of Trancers 4 here.)

It’s been a bit of a slog these last few weeks, particularly getting through Trancers 4: Jack of Swords. As terrible as that film was, Trancers 5: Sudden Deth is an improvement. Is it a good movie? No. But it’s better than both the third and fourth films, and makes it worth sticking it out through the whole series. (I understand that there’s a Trancers 6 out there, but I’m going to give that one a miss. Lacking Tim Thomerson, it’s not a proper Trancers film.)

The movie begins with an execrable voice-over introduction to remind you of all the horrible stuff from the previous movie. As it’s only been a week since I saw Trancers 4, I didn’t need it. Its value is in identifying all the various Shakespearean names they gave to the world and characters: Prospero, Caliban (from The Tempest), Oberon, etc. I don’t know why they gave the squeaky-voiced warrior-woman character the name Shaleen; it didn’t quite fit.

This film is about Jack Deth trying to go home to Earth, while Caliban, self-resurrected through his inexpertly-painted portrait, seeks to take over not just the world, but all of time and space. Jack needs to go to the Castle of Unrelenting Terror to retrieve the Tiamond (yes, with a “T”), which will send him to his proper universe. So it’s a traditional fantasy-style quest, complete with horses, brigands, and battle scenes.

Said battle scenes in this movie are far better than in the previous, which is weird because they obviously filmed the movies back-to-back. Nevertheless, I’ll take the improvement. Caliban displays remarkable telekinetic abilities, not unlike Force-telekinesis, though fifty times lamer. It looked like they just didn’t have the energy/budget to have the actors physically fight Caliban. A sub-plot with Lyra becoming a seer played out, though it didn’t advance the story. Prospero the good Trancer tried to get Jack Deth to recognize that all Trancers aren’t evil, making it seem as if Jack is some kind of a Trancer-racist (instead of someone who’s had everything taken from him by Trancers; go figure).

The dialogue was a lot funnier in this movie than the previous, and the tone lighter. This helped immensely, because it allowed Thomerson to once again make use of his skills as a straight man in a crazy world. One exchange I particularly liked:

Prospero: Killing is not always the answer.

Jack: It’s usually a pretty good guess.

That worked, as well as a number of other clever lines. Why didn’t we get this in the previous film?

If you’re looking for unrelenting terror in the Castle of Unrelenting Terror, you won’t find it. It was a missed opportunity for the characters not to comment upon this.

Anyway, the saga’s over. I’m glad it went out on a more quality note than #4, but it still didn’t quite match the first or second in fun. Still, if you’re in the mood to watch a movie about a dimension-hopping, time-traveling zombie-killer named Deth, you could do a lot worse than Trancers 5.

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Movie Review: Trancers 4: Jack of Swords

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(Interested readers can see my review of Trancers here, my review of Trancers II here, and my review of Trancers III here.)

It’s safe to say that the Trancers franchise has not just gone off the rails with Trancers 4: Jack of Swords, but has raced over a cliff, fallen down a ravine, and smashed itself to bits on the jagged rocks below. Everything that made the original Trancers movies so entertaining has been left behind in this fourth offering, including the intensity, awareness of its own silliness, and anything resembling a decent performance.

Jack Deth, portrayed with wooden unease by Tim Thomerson, has become a chrononaut (a term I borrowed from Michael Moorcock) for the Council. The horrible, Trancer-led dystopia has apparently not come to pass (presumably as a result of the efforts of the previous films), so Jack time-travels to various eras to fix the streams of history, or some such. After some needlessly hostile exchanges with a beautiful scientist, his time machine crashes in an alternate universe that’s stuck in medieval times. While there isn’t a language barrier, there are Trancers, which behave more like energy vampires from Buck Rogers than the Trancers we’ve all come to know and love. In fact, I don’t know why they’re called Trancers at all.

The dialogue in the film is a mix of modern idiom and pseudo-English-accented mystic-speak, which doesn’t help the viewer take the events seriously. Everyone who isn’t overacting obviously doesn’t want to be there. The overall tenor of the film was uneven: Jack’s Long Second watch malfunctions in the worst way possible, but Thomerson’s subsequent comedic stylings felt out of place in the general, dreadful seriousness of everything else. The main bad guy, played by martial artist Clabe Hartley, almost but not quite saves the film. He moves well, speaks his lines clearly, and has a good presence throughout. Another relative stand-out was the first Trancer in the film, who didn’t last long: Borgia. Menacing, evil, with some dry humor. A shame he didn’t make it. I’d rather watch a Borgia film than another Jack Deth movie, at this rate.

In terms of swordfights, the film had several, and they were all terrible. People swinging swords at other people’s swords, for example, instead of giving you the impression that they were actually trying to hit each other. (Hitting swords edge on edge is a terribly bad idea if you want to keep your sword after the fight: they tend to get horribly notched. Real swordsmen don’t fight that way.) One guy had a katana, which was out of place among the European-style long swords. A few people held their swords with the blades backward, as though reverse-grip swordfighting was a thing. (It isn’t.) The Trancer vampires, all of whom were supposed to be big, strong, and tough, died easily at the hands of ignorant peasants. How did they become the rulers of the world if they were such wimps?

Through an incomprehensible bootstrapping paradox from a future-seeing wizard who draws pictures of his visions, Jack Deth saves the day and defeats the Trancers. But he’s stuck in this alternate medieval dimension, his time travel device is broken, and he’s universes away from a nice bathroom with a flush toilet. How will he survive?

We’ll just have to see in the fifth movie.

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Movie Review: Trancers III

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(Interested readers can find my review of Trancers here, and my review of Trancers II here.)

The lighthearted humor of the previous movies is nowhere to be found in Trancers III: Deth Lives, making it a darker, more violent film. This presents a tremendous problem, because when a movie takes itself so seriously, the audience is obliged to take it seriously, and neither the story nor the acting in this offering are strong enough to support that. The ponderous grimness of the film doesn’t do the character of Jack Deth any favors, either: before, he was the perfect straight man in a silly set of circumstances. Now he’s a straight man in a dark world, so he doesn’t stand out.

Helen Hunt closes out her character Lena in this movie (and hence ends her association with the series), which is a terrible shame. Tim Thomerson does the best he can with what he’s given, which is enough, apparently, to keep the series going at least a couple more movies after this one. The best performance comes from Andrew Robinson, one of the finest character actors in Hollywood. Here he plays Colonel “Daddy” Muthuh, a psychopathic doctor/mad scientist, and invests his inimitable style of insanity into the role. Everybody else is instantly forgettable.

The plot is simple enough: there’s a Trancer war in the future that the good guys are losing (because all the hard work Jack and Lena and everybody else did in the earlier films didn’t make the least bit of difference, I guess), so Jack Deth is sent physically into the year 2005 to stop the Trancers at their source: Colonel Muthuh’s Trancer experimentation. Colonel Muthuh’s Trancer lab is located underneath a strip club, mostly so there can be a scene of a topless woman with pasties dancing on stage. A bizarre, alien-looking robot called Shark is sent to help Jack, but proves itself mostly useless. Guns are fired. Blood flies. Jack’s time machine has a black-painted apple corer on it. At one point, deliberately invoking his role as Larry from Hellraiser, Andrew Robinson as Colonel Muthuh says, “Come to Daddy.”

I got the impression that there was some kind of social commentary at the core of the story, but I couldn’t suss it out. Steroids are bad? The military is bad? Military people on steroids are bad? It didn’t make sense. Nor did the process of turning someone into a Trancer.

Unfortunately, this entry into the Trancers oeuvre represents a steep drop-off in quality from the previous two. However, if you’re a completist like me, you have to watch it.

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Movie Review: Trancers II

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(Interested readers can check out my review of Trancers, the first movie in the series, here.)

When you’re making an unapologetically low-budget B-movie like Trancers II, you can get away with a whole lot; your audience is expecting cheese, so you might as well serve it up. Huge chunks of plot exposition in the first few minutes? Sure. Rewriting the canon to fit the current plot? Go for it. More mindless violence for the sake of showing exploding blood packets? Oh yeah. This film is the perfect follow-up to Trancers: it’s silly, doesn’t take itself seriously, and expands the Trancers universe just enough to provide an entertaining surprise here and there.

Tim Thomerson continues the role he was born to play: Jack Deth, now the bodyguard to Hap Ashby. Hap’s on the wagon (for the most part), and has become a wealthy commodities broker. Jack’s wife Lena, played by Helen Hunt, complicates things by wanting to buy a house of their own instead of living in Ashby’s palatial estate.

And then Whistler’s brother shows up, Trancers appear, and everything goes to hell.

Yes, it’s Whistler’s brother. Not his son, because it’s funnier to have a character named Whistler’s brother, especially when Whistler’s brother is the leader of a radical environmental cult group bent on taking over the world with herb-fueled zombie Trancers. Remember: this movie was made in the early 90’s, when you could get away with making fun of environmental whackos. Today you’d be thrown in jail as a Global Warming Denier for even considering the script.

While the story is all over the place compared to the first film, Trancers II makes up for it by populating the cast with three B-movie titans: Jeffrey Combs of Reanimator and From Beyond fame as Dr. Pyle; Barbara Crampton (also from Reanimator and From Beyond) in a thankless role as a TV interviewer; and Richard Lynch, who’s been the bad guy in so many movies and television shows that his sere, aquiline visage must haunt the media-fueled nightmares of everyone born before 1975. It does mine, at least.

One of the most remarkable elements of the movie is the bizarre, only-in-science-fiction love triangle that occurs: Jack Deth’s first wife is time-traveled just before her death to stop Whistler’s brother in the past where Jack lives with his second wife Lena. (No, the sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense. Deal.) So now Lena and the first Mrs Deth must share Jack, at least for a little while. This situation is so untenable that Lena shouts, in frustration, “You’re a bigamist, Jack!” But what’s a man to do? In Jack’s timeline he was a widower. Now he’s got two wives to deal with, one of whom has been implanted into a young, nubile teenage body.

More scenes were played for laughs than in the first movie, which is fine: the heavy, apocalyptic theme could use a little lightening. The baseball game with the drunks wasn’t as funny as intended. The exploding ham was hilarious because food is always funny. The Long Second Watch now includes a Tapback feature, which you’ll have to see to believe. Mcnulty returns as an even more obnoxious teenager. People inexplicably and instantly turn into Trancers, and disappear exactly like The Invaders when Jack shoots them to death. The final confrontation makes little sense.

It’s a great sequel. Did you like Trancers? You’ll dig Trancers II.

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Movie Review: Trancers (1984)

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I first saw Trancers as a videotape rental in high school, which I suppose dates me somewhat. My standards as a teenager weren’t terribly high, so at the time I thought it was great. The film was ludicrous but I loved it all the same. Mental time travel to an ancestor? The Long Second Watch? A guy named Whistler with hypnotic powers? Come on.

Now, decades later, does the movie hold up?

Yes. Yes it does.

It’s a low budget movie. But to paraphrase a former Secretary of Defense, you go to production with the budget you have, not the budget you wish you had. So there are parts of it that look cheesy. Can’t be helped. It’s not the budget that makes a movie, but the care put into it, and in the case of Trancers, a lot of care was put into it.

There’s not one performance in the film that takes you out of the story, which is one of its greatest strengths. Tim Thomerson plays protagonist Jack Deth with perfect, down-the-line seriousness, which makes him stand out in what is already kind of a silly movie. His charisma and imposing physical presence make you believe in the role. Helen Hunt is appealing as Lena, appropriately scared and vulnerable when necessary. She deserves great respect for returning in the sequel. The movie wouldn’t have worked anywhere near as well without Michael Stefani as Whistler: with his staring eyes and creepy smile, he’s the bad guy this film needed.

The story’s uneven, and an interested viewer could spend days picking holes in the plot. But why would you want to? The bizarre dystopia of Jack Deth’s time, with its Council of Elders and half of L.A. sunk into the sea, where real coffee is prized like gold but everyone smokes tobacco (at least, I assume it’s tobacco), when mankind has colonized other planets but hasn’t conquered death at the hands of a madman and his zombie army: it’s extremely imaginative. What the writers don’t show but hint at makes you fill in the blanks yourself. The Trancers themselves are sort of like zombies but with a bit more volition, making it relevant to our current zombie-obsessed culture. Why can the future cops send Long Second Watches into the past but not people? Don’t worry about it: just watch the movie. If members of the Council are eliminated in the future when Whistler kills their ancestors in the past, how do we know they even existed? Just…just stop asking so many questions, already.

Yes, we did dress a lot like they did in the 1985 depicted in the movie, and most of us thought it was cool. Thing is, we could wash out the hair spray and take off our square-ended neckties, but today’s tattoos are rather more permanent, and those facial piercings leave literal holes. In your face. I’ll take a pair of Jordache denims over skinny jeans any day of the week (in part because I can’t fit into skinny jeans).

Whether you’re a newcomer to Charles Band’s oeuvre or looking for a piece of sci-fi horror nostalgia, I’m pleased to report that you won’t be disappointed in Trancers. Get out there, find yourself a copy, and get watching. Your New Coke’s getting warm.

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