Scanner Cop II, aka Scanners: The Showdown, opens with a small town police department arresting a wanderer. As a shrink tries to analyze the oddly silent perp, he realizes he’s dealing with a scanner by the name of Volkin. By then it’s too late: the scanner psychically commands the cops to attack each other, kicking off a killing spree that has Volkin targeting other scanners as he’s found a way to absorb their powers. I’m going to venture a guess that the original concept was Scanner Vampire (one character uses this exact term), but the producers retooled the script to feature Scanner Cop once that actor agreed to return. Unfortunately, he’s shoved into a mediocre plot without the supporting cast that elevated his performance the last time around, instead leaning heavily on tough cop movie clichés.
Although it’s only been a year since the last film, this one takes place further in the future. There’s no mention of what happened to Scanner Cop’s adoptive father, who was a key reason the last film worked so well. They attempt to fill his absence with Robert Forster as the new commander—and believe me, he’s a master at delivering hokey dialog in a believable way—but their relationship is routine. Scanner Cop himself is just a grizzled loner now, which is much less interesting than a rookie cop making the most of his affliction. Eventually, Scanner Cop will learn to control machinery with psychic lightning, a useful superpower which will never be mentioned again.
So who is Volkin and why does he want revenge? Volkin is the franchise’s lamest villain, having escaped from the mental institution’s scanner ward after Scanner Cop arrested him between films. Despite sporting the same director as the surprisingly grounded previous entry, this is the first Scanners film that ever bored me. The last three sequels did a great job camouflaging their straight-to-video shortcomings with kooky effects and over-the-top performances. This one isn’t terrible for a cheapo sequel, but it is terrible for a Scanners film.
Consider how hard it is to come up with a boring premise in a universe which inherently makes one’s imagination tingle with possibilities. You could go full-tilt 90s sequel and send scanners to space when a weapons manufacturer convinces the government to implement an orbital defense grid (which is secretly a device to amplify his or her scanner abilities). Or, if your budget can’t support spaceships (hard to believe considering both Leprechaun and Critters could) you could have a character like Volkin pose as a cop who the real Scanner Cop has to track down, Miami Blues style. Too highbrow for ya? Then do Scanner Versus Highlander… or versus whatever the hell you can get the rights to. Instead what we get is an uninspired film with absolutely no reason to exist.
Worst of all, most of the good stuff takes place off screen and Volkin doesn’t explode any heads. Instead he sends his victims into meltdown mode, a process which happens too often and takes too long to entertain. At one point my girlfriend left the room, returned, and asked, “That guy’s still melting?” You finally get a head explosion late in the show, but by then it’s too late and not quite as dazzling as any of the franchise’s previous head explosions.
Getting through this Scanners wasn’t nearly as painful as it was to get through The Howling V, which I featured last year, but there are a hundred werewolf films so it’s easy to see why they couldn’t come up with anything new. There are only five scanner films, though, so tell me: Why the hell did the franchise run out of steam so early? Even the laziest screenwriters should have been more inspired than this. It’s a film that reeks of studio interference and/or a cynical pre-production phase… because I refuse to believe the director who made the previous movie willingly chose this route.
31 Days of Gore wraps tomorrow, Halloween day. I always revisit an absolute banger for the final day. Subscribe to get an email notification!
