Trancers
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| WARNING: This review may contain spoilers. |
Trancers (also known as Future Cop) follows future police trooper Jack Deth is on a personal hunt to clean up the streets of Angel City of any roaming trancers left over in the world after the fall of a man named Whistler. This low-budget Science Fiction film shows a bleak future, brought on largely by Whistler and the many devoted followers that become zombies under his influence. Somehow he has gone back to Los Angeles in the eighties to take down the members of the Committee. After one of the three is wiped out of existence, Trooper Jack Deth is brought back after leaving the force and go back in time to find Whistler and save the two remaining members of the board.
For an eighties Science Fiction flick that was apparently shot on a low-budget, you can't really tell. Sure it isn't the cleanest kind of movie to come out of the eighties in general, but that works so well with the premise that you won't pay attention to it. The settings are bleak and despair ridden when necessary, that feeds off the rougher film grain and rawer production qualities nicely, all the while still looking like a professional movie of its time period and not just something shot with VHS analog cameras. What is surprising is the roughly seventy-six minute length of the film, which doesn't allow much filler to seep in, keeping much of the action coming at the viewer with a decent amount of character growth littered about throughout the film, getting certain points across that need to be presented.
But Trancers really start off hamming things up a bit. Showing the dark future of Angel City, Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) narrates his role and some background about the Trancers before entering into a small diner. Here, it seems to take no time at all before Jack is performing a scan on customer in the diner, and then assaulted by a little old lady, who is one of the remaining Trancers. After the fight and a signal for backup troopers to arrive, he is given an ultimatum by his boss McNulty (At LaFleur) to do the jobs assigned to him and quit his personal vendetta, or quit, as per the Chairman's orders. Of course, this leads to the inevitable "bad ass" moment where Jack takes his badge and throws it to the ground, drives off, and McNulty informs his partner that Jack was a good trooper. Of course this doesn't last long as Jack is tracked down years later on the coast of a beach, and given a summons to appear before the Committee, which he refuses until he learns that Whistler is still alive.
The main plot of the film is summed up in this visit. Chairman Spencer (Richard Herd) had witnessed the third member of the group to vanish before his eyes, as well as his kids and grandkids. A holographic message was sent informing the remaining two that Whistler intends to kill their ancestors, thus ridden Angel City of them and allowing him control. Jack Deth is then assigned to go back in time and protect two specific ancestors of that time. In his assignment, Jack ends up in the body of a guy named Phil, who was currently entertaining a girl named Leena (Helen Hunt), getting ready to go to work and waiting for Phil to take her. However, due to the shift between Phil and Jack, the characters becomes a completely different person then the one she saw the night before, which frightens her, making her want to be left alone. But, Jack continues to push her, finding out where streets are, asking for help, and generally wondering what it was he did wrong. The job she was late for ended up being a photographer at a mall Santa display, which evokes the next Trancer battle as the mall Santa Clause, who's real name is Murray (Peter Schrum), in front of all the children transforms and attacks Jack. The fight sequence is pretty interesting, but you can tell the whole thing was choreographed pretty loosely, and the two even seem to work together in making the Jack Deth character the victim, such as getting pinned against the fake village house with mounted antlers, and the Santa Clause grabs a gun from a responding security guard and clearly doesn't bother aiming, completely missing the pinned down Jack Deth. This causes Jack to not only lose one of the photographs of the ancestors he needs to save, but in the end basically kidnaps Leena, who starts to believe Jack's story from this moment on.
As the story progresses, a clear relationship builds between Jack and Leena, originally as a woman he looked to for help and who didn't trust him, to falling in love with one another. The changes end up being pretty swift, starting with Leena taking off when Jack confronts the first ancestor, only to return when the story made sense to her, to falling for Jack in the club when an old boyfriend of hers, Jerry (Ed McClarty), starts hassling her as the Punk band is playing their rendition of "Dashing Through the Snow," only to find Jack knocking him out when the tensions between the two start to escalate. It all becomes clear when they begin making out in her apartment in China Town, and prior to going into bed, the two are interrupted by the only ancestor of McNulty, who tells Jack he is being summoned once more due to the progress of the job.
The main focus ends up being on Hap Ashby (Biff Manard), the descendant of Chairman Ashe (Anne Seymour). All of this ties into a plan to clean out a certain area of the homeless by Police Detective Weisling, who is really Whistler (Michael Stani) inside his body. With this plan, he and his squad hope to find Ashby, as well as even eliminate Jack Deth if he gets in their way. There isn't much time devoted to shelling out Ashby's character, so a little descriptive speech from Jack later on will explain his importance as he tries to sober him up with information about the future, with how he has to clean himself up and father a child, and reveals his plan to stop Whistler all together. This leads to a rather anti-climactic battle that, without really making it painfully obvious, sets the Trancers film up for a sequel, as well as a bit of a letdown as to the conclusion of the final battle between Jack and Whistler.
For a film not too long over the hour mark, Trancers does a pretty decent job of telling a pretty simple story and feeding into rather comical satires of the sixties detective story, which is even something referenced in the film whenever Jack is watching television. The acting is surprisingly well done for this sort of movie, and its clear that everyone involved was doing their best to make it all believable. Some of the bit characters, such as Santa Clause and the little old lady from the diner at the start of the film just don't quite come off as believable, and the make up effects really could have been better as well. Throughout the film the characters are mentioned as looking yellow, but none of the trancers in this movie had a yellow glow to them at all, or at least some didn't have one noticeable if it was actually present. You also have the character Engineer Ruth "Ruthie" Raines (Thelma Hopkins) who is obviously a former love interest of Jack who doesn't have the best acting, and even when she is belting out cheesy cliché lines like "I hope she's worth it..." you still can't really get into that character in this movie. Thankfully she isn't around all that much.
Other than that, the spirit of the early police serials can be found throughout this film, and with just a little bit of unbelievable acting, some stripped down futuristic scenery for Angel City, and an ending that really just feels more frustratingly bad and sequel baited than it should, you can't help but walk away somewhat satisfied with Trancers. Jack Deth is a believable character as one of the Angel City troopers, and the futuristic story line, while a bit generic even for its time, is handled with care among the short runtime. This really isn't one of the most memorable movies you'll ever see of the genre, but for a quick flick to kick back to that actually has a good deal of potential to be something more than just a one film gem of the eighties, having strong enough leads to leave you interested in the future adventures of Jack Deth, whether in film form or even a televised series (though the first of the two actually did happen). It's a good film, but that's about as far as you can go with it. If you're just looking to kill some time and happen on this movie, then give Trancers a shot.
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