Trancers.

Okay, after my fuck up last review, I'm gonna go back to more comfortable territory - schlock. Today we will be looking at the Trancers series, yes I will eventually try to review all five films in the series and yes I know there is a sixth one...but I'm not touching that shit. As far as I can tell, the whole series has maintained a fairly consistent level of quality and entertainment, it looks like the second and fourth sequels are the worst ones...but still aren't necessarily bad, we'll get to those anyway, for now...here is number one. Enjoy!


So yes, as touched upon, Trancers came out in 1985, stars the awesome Tim Thomerson and ended up a franchise of six films. The sixth one released eight years after the fifth. Two and three came out a year apart and four and five in the same year. Since the sixth was released so late and doesn't have Thomerson in it except for stock footage, I won't be reviewing it. So onwards with the film that started it all!

Tim Thomerson plays Jack Deth a clichéd noir-cop archetype (who still gets silly one liners, yeah!) who is obsessively hunting the psychic Whistler and his cult of Trancers after a Trancer murdered his wife. Jack Deth is just in general a great character and Thomerson puts on an excellent performance, the scene of him dancing in the punk club had me laughing so hard I had to pause the movie. And it works because Deth is such a well established character and Thomerson acts him so convincingly. Man, Helen Hunt looks so hot in this movie, you look at her today and it's hard to imagine, she plays Leena, the love interest of the film...who gives into Deth and believes all the crazy shit around her, way too easily. Sadly Thomerson and Hunt have little chemistry and the whole love interest thing feels shoe horned at best, but they do in most of these movies. Then again no one is quite as terrible as Michael Stefani, if he overacted any harder, he might explode. He plays Whistler like the Joker with the iconic laugh and menace replaced by extra helpings of camp and it isn't fun, or funny, it's just annoying.

A film-theorist once claimed that no matter the genre, every film is a love story and I think Trancers is really the embodiment of that. Despite having time travel, murder, zombies, gadgets and all the rest, Trancers is really just about a girl, a girl a guy starts falling hopelessly in love with.

If you're wondering what a Trancer is...the film barely half explains it, despite it being the title of the movie. As far as I get it, Whistler can manipulate those with weak minds, sort of like the Jedi Mind trick - how or why, is never explained. And his version of the trick turns people into zombies who burn up when they die...why or how? I don't know the answer to that one either. It does kind of feel like you've been dropped into a film half way through the story. I mean it isn't hard to follow or anything, but the first half an hour or so is very jarring. Plus, with Whistler dead by the end, how are there five more films left? Surely there can be no more Trancers.

Time travel is pretty unique in this film too, well as far as I've seen, your body stays in the present but your conciousness is placed in the body of whatever ancestor was alive in the time and place you want to be in, that is really clever.

Trancers is goofy as all hell, and I love it for that, it makes fun of itself and that really plays in the films favour. It knows when to be serious, but also knows when to be silly, low budget films like this never work if they are played completely straight and the film seems to know that. Especially the future segments, they wouldn't look out of place on an episode of Classic Who. However, as much as I love this movie, calling it goofy doesn't escape from the fact that the film looks like shit, for the most part. Calculating inflation and conversion ratings on estimated guesses of this films budget would suggest it was made for about the equivalent of half a million in today's pounds. So although it has a budget much larger than most indie movies, the budget was still pretty damn tiny and it really shows, the film has lacklustre special effects, sets, props and so on. There is also some extremely clunky choreography, just something really wooden about the fight sequences, it looks less like a polished final product and more a cleaned up rehearsal. With a hilariously anti-climatic third act.

Not looking like a polished final product is probably a good way to sum up the whole production, there is some awful cinematography, some incredibly shoddy editing and you could practically play a drinking game with the amount of time boom mics are in shots, camera man can be seen, set limits are obvious or there is an obvious continuity error etc etc I mean I'm actually slightly astounded by how poorly this is put together, it makes some of the other films I've watched recently seem like high quality in comparison and that says a lot. 

That isn't to say the film is without some nice, visual moments, I really like the concept of 'Lost Angeles', a segment of Los Angeles now almost completely underwater and only accessible by diving, the scary thing is, in a few hundred years this actually might be a reality but overall, Trancers is a pretty awful looking film.

So do I recommend it? I think I'm getting soft in my 'old age', Trancers is a pretty terrible film but I still loved it. I mean a certain amount can be forgiven with how old this is and how small the budget is, but not all of it, this is a shoddy production, even for a low budget movie and a lot of the mistakes were unnecessary, I mean did anyone watch this before they released it? Jesus. But Trancers just tells such a great story and just has so many great characters and concepts, I'd just feel wrong not recommending this. I'm not even saying this in an ironic sense, any fan of the Sci-Fi genre that doesn't have this film in their collection is doing themselves a disservice.

Think About It!

-Locke