Trancers II - The Return of Jack Deth.

I was honestly planning on doing one more After Dark horror film before doing the rest of the Trancers series...but why bother? I have more negative reviews, than positive reviews of their films on my blog now and I don't have much faith in the one I picked, so I'll just get round to it...eventually, so onwards with Trancers II!

The year is 1991, the year I was born! Thomerson, Manard, LaFleur and Hunt are reprising their roles, along with the same director and writers. With a lot of the fans of the series saying as far as low-budget sequels go, this one was alright. With that out of the way, let's find out what what I thought of the first Trancers sequel!

Trancers II much like the original Trancers, fails more in execution than in its ideas. Trancers II brings a lot of interesting, new things to the table. Jack's wife is in this one, who is arguably the most important character in the whole series but she is poorly scripted and badly acted, making what should be a badass character and the cool inclusion of a second trancer hunter into a load of nothing. We have other things like a trancer farm, a drug from the future, a whole trancer army and more...but none of it ever really seems to work until the last half an hour or so, where everything comes together. But it's hard to give a film positive praise when only the last half an hour or so is worth watching.

Six years have passed - making it that the Trancers films are moving in real time. McNulty gets sent back in time to bring Deth back to the future using some new doodad as his body in the future has now ossified so he must come up the line in Phil's body. What this means for Phil and what it has meant for the last six years...is anyone's guess. The future is preparing for a trancer war and they need Deth, who has been offered a seat on the council. Ashby has over the six years made a huge amount of money and has his own estate and a collection of firetrucks. Deth has been living with Ashby with Leena (wait, it is Lena now?) in tow so he can keep him safe, but Lena wants a home and a family - women! Equilibrium is broken when McNulty arrives with his doodad and trancers start popping up all over the place, leading Deth into a rescue mission for his wife, who is now alive in a new body. Thus, a love triangle is born. Whistler II has created a trancer farm where Jack's wife is being held prisoner and ends up building an entire trancer army. As it eventually turns out the farm is more than just for trancers, it's also for the crack of the future, which is what Whistler II is using to control people since only the weak of mind can be tranced. Eventually Lena is captured and sent to be turned into a trancer, but Jack and Alice - trancer hunters are on the way!

The biggest failing of this film is how much it drops the ball on its most important and key moment, the reuniting of Alice and Jack. This should be a huge, triumphant, epic moment! Alice's death is basically the reason for everything and then they finally come together and just...Alice just doesn't seem like the kind of woman Jack would marry and this almost seems mirrored in how little chemistry the two actors have between one another. Alice even points out how little she and Lena have in common which makes it even more noticeable just how wrong Alice feels. The dialogue in both films has always been a little goofy, but it flatout seems to unravel when these two share scenes. The problems this all causes between Lena and Jack is thankfully much better handled although Jack still comes across more goofy than badass like he did in the last film. The whole thing is just so stupid and contrived, I mean how do they fuck up quite possibly the most important point in your own story? The fact this aspect fails so much actively hurts the rest of the film.


Trancers are oddly missing from the film. I mean sure, in the first half an hour or so we get these new, slightly different looking trancers but for the last hour or so, we never see the trancers transform on screen or see them get singed when they die. Kinda weird considering they went out of their way with some serious hack writing to get the trancers back in the film, only to awkwardly (in terms of special effects at least) drop them like a third of the way through.

In terms of looks, I certainly noticed a lot less obvious mistakes like the numerous ones in the original Trancers although yes, there are more boom mics in shots, this movie even comes with a new addition, boom mic shadows! But I guess having six years between the two films improves your production quality. It also could be down to the fact that there is barely any action in this at all, there are a few, brief small scale shootouts and one big one to close the movie, but really there is little emphasis on action this time around, most of the time the action feels shoehorned in. So on the one hand it sucks there is less action this time around but on the other, at least the film looks a lot less crappy.

The whole of Trancers II seems way goofier than the first one, the first one was still goofy and deliberately so, but it still had this constant noir like feel to it, to keep it dark and serious in the right places but this one...Trancers II is basically a comedy. Lots of even more goofy ideas, lots more one-liners and lots of whimsy. It is entertaining on the most basic of levels, but I really don't think it works outside of a few off guard chuckles. I mean there are dark ideas, the trancer farm, Stillwell's mission and so on but it just isn't played as seriously as it demands which is a real shame, because as I hope I've stressed, it has all the makings for a great movie but it just falls down in the execution.

It probably doesn't help much that the film is so poorly paced. The actual plot of the movie doesn't really start to come together until the last half an hour which is probably why the movie at that point starts to get much more emotionally hard hitting and action packed. I mean the first hour had lots of chances for epic moments but the terrible acting of Megan Ward coupled with an underwritten script made the first hour weak as best, even the action wasn't as fun this time around because there was so little of it. I just wish the first hour was of the same quality and enjoyment of the last half an hour.

So do I recommend it? Trancers II is better on one thing alone, an exploding ham! In all seriousness Trancers II fails both as a sequel and as a film in general. Giving Whistler a brother just to carry on the threat of  trancers is hack writing at its finest and isn't even used all that much either and thanks to timetravel being a central plot device it manages to both confuse every plot detail and give the writers an excuse to go back on any idea or plot point they don't like. It does nothing to expand to the Trancers universe and ends up feeling, in the end, like the poorman's version of the original Trancers. Let's hope number three is better.

Think About It!

-Locke