Trancers, 1984.
Directed by Charles Band.
Starring Tim Thomerson, Helen Hunt, Art LaFleur, Michael Stefani, Telma Hopkins, and Richard Herd.
SYNOPSIS:
A bounty hunter from the future travels back in time to 1980s Los Angeles to apprehend a crime lord who can turn people into violent zombies.
It’s 1984 Los Angeles and Charles Band has clearly seen Blade Runner and (possibly) The Terminator, mashing together the two iconic sci-fi action movies but on a much smaller budget to create Trancers, one of the most notable movies from Empire Entertainment released during a very fruitful period for the production company.
In the year 2247 a criminal mastermind called Whistler (Michael Stefani) uses his psychic powers to turn the weak-minded into zombie-like killers called trancers. Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) is a police trooper whose job is to hunt down trancers in an attempt to get to Whistler, but Whistler has managed to escape Deth by using a drug to send his consciousness back in time to 1985 to inhabit the body of an ancestor while his physical body remains in 2247. Deth destroys Whistler’s body and then travels back through time, inhabiting the body of his ancestor Phil Deth (also played by Thomerson) and then having to convince Phil’s girlfriend Leena (Helen Hunt) to help him hunt down his arch nemesis, who has now inhabited the body of a police detective called Weisling.
With so many obvious comparisons to other movies, Trancers may lack originality or a budget to do anything majorly different with the material, but what it lacks in top-notch special effects and a nuanced script it more than makes up for with high energy and a sense of fun. Tim Thomerson is excellent as the grizzled Deth – in both his incarnations – and gives off a genuine ‘cop-on’the-edge’ vibe throughout that sits somewhere between Snake Plisskin and Mad Max in terms of gruff appeal (speaking of Mad Max, Thomerson looks uncannily like Mel Gibson when his hair is dyed black to play Jack).
He also has quite a nice chemistry with Helen Hunt, who seems to have gotten worse as an actress as she’s gotten older, because here she has a natural charm similar to Linda Hamilton in The Terminator and isn’t nearly as irritating as she was in those romantic comedies she made her name in. Support is also fairly solid, especially from the wonderful Art LaFleur, a man who was born to play police captains if ever there was one.
Any film involving time travel is open for plot holes and Trancers is no different, so don’t sit there think about it too hard (see if you can spot the flaw when LaFleur’s characters travels back to inhabit what he calls “the only ancestor I could find”), but if you want a bit of sci-fi action and don’t want to get bogged down by the stodgy mythology of Blade Runner or any other overlong fantasy epic you care to mention then Trancers and its low-budget charm can provide an instant hit of entertainment, with its naff-but-still-good optical effects and trancer make-up, which is fairly minimal but it means that it hasn’t aged as badly as many other B-movies doing the rounds at the time.
Coming in a three-disc (one UHD and two Blu-rays) set you also get the 24-minute semi-sequel Trancers: City of Lost Angels, which stars several of the main cast from Trancers – including Tim Thomerson, Helen Hunt and Art LaFleur – and is set between the first movie and its proper movie sequel, Trancers II. The footage has not been remastered and is VHS quality, but it is watchable and a fun extension to the main movie. There are also new interviews with Charles Band, editor Ted Nicolau (who would go on to direct the excellent Subspecies series for Band’s Full Moon Pictures production company) and a collector’s booklet with notes and essays on the movie, plus an archive audio commentary by Charles Band and Tim Thomerson, making this a fairly stacked edition.
Did Trancers need a 4K UHD release, given the cheap-and-cheerful nature of its production and B-movie status? Possibly not, and the UHD image isn’t exactly a generational leap in quality from the Blu-ray, but to have one of Empire/Full Moon’s flagship movies on the highest quality format while other, more notable Hollywood titles, are still languishing on standard HD formats will bring tears of joy to a certain demographic of physical media collector.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
