Trancers III follows Jack Deth (Thomerson) living a mundane life in 1990s LA as a private detective. All that changes when a big android/alien dude comes from the future and press-gangs him into going back with him to fight the trancers. Deth's new mission: go back to 2005 and stop the US government's Trancer program before it gets off the ground. There he meets back up with his ex-wife Helen Hunt, who's harboring a woman (Melanie Smith) who escaped the Trancer program. She could be the key to his stopping it. When he gets caught though all bets are off. He has nothing to fear though, right? Only squids can be tranced...
It's fascinating that Thomerson, Hunt, Megan Ward, and a big android alien looking dude in a 75-minute package could drag, but this did. I mean, 75 minutes of Thomerson scowling and burning heaters in a trench coat should be enough to do it, so what did this do wrong? The biggest culprit was Deth spent a good portion of the second half of the film strapped to a chair getting tranced. Come again? He wasn't stalking the hallways, cigarette in his mouth and gun in hand, taking out Trancers? And what happened to that big alien/android guy? How was this not those two in a buddy cop paradigm? One thing thing I'll give it though: the shorter runtime makes all of these issues much more tolerable. It's a lesson to all filmmakers out there, better to be at 75 minutes than 105.
This is Tim Thomerson's 16th film at the DTVC. That's really high for a non-Hall of Famer, which begs the question: could he ever get in? Perhaps he'd already be in if I hadn't gone on hiatus for 4 years or so. Just the same, when a film has a lead of his quality, he can really make up for its shortcomings; but if he's not used right, he can also exacerbate them, and I think that's what happened here. Tim Thomerson is not a man to be strapped down to a chair and tortured most of a film. That's not what we come to a Thomerson movie for, we want the Thomerson we know a love, this guy in the trench coat mean mugging it and burning heaters, and this unfortunately didn't have enough of that.
Helen Hunt is back for the third and last time. Mad About You started in 1992, the same year this one came out. By 1996 she was in Twister, and by 1997 she had an Oscar. I was trying to think how many Oscar winners we've had on here. De Niro, Pesci, and Pacino, plus Scorsese and Kathryn Bigelow as directors; also Ernest Borgnine, Jack Palance, and Angelina Jolie. Probably the one who's had the most tags is Cuba Gooding Jr. Stallone won one for Best Screenplay, as did Quentin Tarantino, who was in the crew of the Dolph workout film Maximum Potential. It's crazy to think our site has had that many Oscar winners, since we're mostly looking at movies like this, but it's always cool when you can see someone either like Helen Hunt, who is pre-Oscar and big network TV show; or if it's someone like Cuba Gooding Jr. or Ernest Borgnine who had the great career and came to DTV after.
Look at that crazy bastard below there. How could you not center the whole film around him and Thomerson? Was it that the make-up work was so arduous that they needed to lessen his role? The two of them along with Melanie Smith should have been going into the bunker where the Trancer project was, and kicking ass and taking names. Just line up the stuntment from LA, put them in military uniforms, and let the crew take them down. In a 75-minute movie, sometimes that's all you need. But if that make-up was too limiting and they needed to do it the way they did, I get that, I just could have gone for more of him.
Finally, it looks like this is only our 12th Full Moon film on the site. Initially I was only seeing 7, but I went back and tagged some that I had missed before; but just the same, 12 is a small number compared to Cannon's 41, PM's 35, and even The Asylum's 30. For one of the all-time great DTV/low budget film companies, that's way too low. At the very least I can finish off the Trancers to get more up here, but I think this also points to a trend in my reviews: I tend to lean more toward action than anything else, which wasn't my intention when I got into this. My early DTV viewing experience was always equal parts action, sci-fi, horror, and comedy--not mention the 90s DTV erotic thriller. This might be as big an indicator as any that I need to mix it up more on the site, which I hope to do more of going forward.
And with that, it's a good time to wrap this up. I wasn't as big a fan of this as I was the first two, but at 75 minutes, that nice runtime definitely mitigates the issues I had with it. Right now all 6 of them are on Tubi, so at least watch the first two and then see if you want to keep going.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105632
No comments:
Post a Comment