Cold Fusion Video Reviews

aka Future Cop

• Produced and directed by Charles Band
• Written by Paul De Meo and Danny Bilson
• Starring
  • Tim Thomerson
  • Helen Hunt
  • Michael Stefani
  • Art La Fleur

Over a thirty-year career with the stated goal of becoming the next Roger Corman, legendary crapmeister Charles Band has produced (or executive produced or associate produced or whatever) over a hundred movies. Some few, such as Reanimator and Crawlspace and The Pit and the Pendulum, have become much-beloved classics among that segment of the moviegoing public that pays attention to such things. Many of the rest, including much of the output of his steadily-waning Full Moon Pictures, are best not mentioned in polite company.

“The jambalaya’s SPICY tonight!”

And just like Corman, Band has directed a small proportion of the movies he’s produced. Some of them feel as though production was ready to start and they didn’t have a director for some reason, so Band took the chair. In any case, the movies that Band both produced and directed, like Metalstorm or Doctor Mordrid, don’t have any particular advantage over the ones he produced without directing.

But if Charles Band will ever be fondly remembered as a director, it will be for this movie: Trancers. No one will ever mistake it for a good movie, but it’s got that certain something that manages to impress only its positive qualities on the viewer’s memory.

Tim Thomerson is Jack Deth, Chandleresque cop on the Angel City PD in the 23rd century, an era which seems to delite in retro fashion and furnishings (sure makes it easy on the costumer and set dresser, doesn’t it?). As he explains in the requisite noir voiceover, his driving mission up until now has been the apprehension of one Martin Whistler (Michael Stefani), who’s used his innate psychic powers to grow a cult of mind-controlled followers called trancers; this obsession has been more than a little personal, as trancers also killed Deth’s wife. Now that Whistler’s supposedly dead, Deth’s basically drifting around, ignoring his current assignments, mopping up stray trancers like the cook in the diner where he stops for coffee. (The cook graciously exhibits for us the features that will distinguish a trancer in full berserker mode, to wit, pasty skin, blackened eyes, and foam-flecked drool. In other words, identical to the protagonist in most Tim Burton movies.)

What would costumers do without retro futures?

Deth gives up his badge, tired of the grief he gets over his personal vendetta, but re-ups when he gets a special summons from the Council, the three-person ruling body that governs this post-quake California. Seems that Whistler isn’t dead after all, and he managed to go back in time to kill the ancestors of the Council members. Because of Deth’s intimate knowledge of Whistler, not to mention his more-than-a-paycheck motivation, he’s selected to follow Whistler back to 1985 Los Angeles, protect the ancestors of the two remaining Council members (one’s already been phased out by Whistler’s actions), and head Whistler off.

One of the movie’s more memorable devices is a clever little reversal of the time travel rules of The Terminator, which posited that living tissue was the only thing that could survive time transit. This time out, they’ve got machines to send objects back in time, but in order for people to go “down the line,” they have to be pharmaceutically regressed into the body of an ancestor in the appropriate time period. Deth thus ends up in the body of a journalist progenitor, Phil, who’s just finished a one-night stand with young Lena (Helen Hunt — everybody pays their dues, brother). Meanwhile, Whistler’s got a leg up; his ancestor in that time period, Whysling, just happens to be a police lieutenant.

This is why Mrs. Claus usually keeps the bullets in a separate location.

Now, the setups designed for economy; aside from a couple of futuristic interior sets (and a matte shot of the post-quake skyscrapers of “Lost Angeles” poking out of the Pacific), the entire movie can play out in various unassuming locales around present-day LA. Special effects are also kept to a minimum; Deth is given his own Bond-style toolkit to help him out, but one is simply a .38 special which also secretly holds two doses of the time-travel antidote to bring Deth and Whistler back to the 23rd century, and the other is a “long-second” watch, which can slow time for Deth, giving him ten seconds in the place of one. This technological marvel is presented for us on screen by an equally advanced cinematic technique called “slow motion.”

Nonetheless, even cheap locations can be used to good effect: A department store North Pole setup (complete with a trancer Santa), a tanning salon, various sections of Chinatown, and an abandoned pulpmill inhabited by homeless drunks provide enough color and variation to liven up the paltry budget, as Deth, assisted by Lena, attempts to get to the Council’s ancestors and, naturally, fall in love along the way. Now if you can just manage to ignore one of the worst film scores ever to saddle a movie, you’ll be in good hands.

What really brings the movie to life is Tim Thomerson, having the time of his life as Jack Deth. Perfectly grizzled and squarejawed, Thomerson’s early experience had been in comedy, and he brings just the right light touch of self-parody to his hyperbolically hardboiled role — slicking back his hair, wearing a trenchcoat, and speaking gruffly in a retro-future lingo of “singeing trancers” and “smallminded squids” (the people weak-willed enough to be tranceable). His lovably crusty Jack Deth is absolutely the only feature which carried the Trancers franchise for the next four (!) installments, despite a complete dearth of inspiration in any of the sequels. (Trancers 6, just released this summer, notably lacks Thomerson — Full Moon’s budgets have shrunk to the point where they could no longer afford him — and the character of Jack Deth is regressed into the body of Phil/Jack’s daughter. You bet your ass I’ll be reviewing it soon.) And mention must be made of Art La Fleur as Deth’s superior McNulty, simply because not to mention La Fleur whenever he appears in a movie is a mortal sin.

It’s a battle of the jawlines!

However, mention must also be made of the completely ridiculous nature of the ending. In deference to those of you who don’t like spoilers in your reviews, we’ll do this in the time-honored style of making the text the same color as the background. If you want to read the following paragraph, highlight it.

<<<<<SPOILER WARNING>>>>>

So Deth’s ready to send Whistler back to the future with his handy ampules of antidote — but one has been damaged in the fight, so only Whistler or Deth can return to his own time. HELLO? It’s not as if the pipeline to the future has been severed or anything — Deth’s compatriots have been pretty free about sending things down the line for him; is it somehow suddenly impossible for them to express-mail him another ampule of antidote to get back?

<<<<<END SPOILER WARNING>>>>>

If Helen Hunt ever gets a lifetime achievement award, I’ll pay $10,000 to have this clip snuck into the tribute montage.

Whatever you do, do NOT attempt to make sense of causality, as Trancers is worse than most time travel movies in that regard. (This came out in 1985, the same year that Back to the Future also required moviegoers to check their brains at the door and not wonder why, in an alternate timeline, someone would have been taking a picture of an empty hedge.) When an ancestor is killed in the past, the descendent in the 23rd century simply disappears — but nothing else in the timeline has changed; everyone remembers the person and reactions with horror, despite the fact that this person has retroactively been rendered non-existent. It’s enough to make you want to kill your own grandfather.

But that’s nothing compared to how the successive movies play with the series’ continuity. By the third one, the method of time travel, the origin of trancers, and even Jack Deth’s haircut have been changed — none of them an improvement. And the less said about Trancers 4 and 5, in which Deth finds himself in an alternate medieval universe that looks remarkably like Romania, the better.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Richard Herd (Councilman Spencer) had a recurring rols as “Admiral Owen Paris” on Voyager, and also played “L’Kor” in the TNG two-parter “Birthright”
  • Biff Manard (”Hap Ashby,” the drunk ballplayer ancestor) played “Ruffian” in the TNG episode “Elementary, Dear Data”