I See Through You

David Cronnenberg’s Scanners came out in 1981 and while not considered one of his great classics the film did have a few moments of truly memorable imagery that help keep it floating around in cult circles. The scene where a guy’s head explodes because an evil scanner uses mental powers on him is just excellent. Every horror fan knows it, and it’s held up as a high bar for unexpected and delightful gore. The original film came and went without general audiences caring, though, nearly flopping at the Box Office (despite the film’s relatively small budget) and it was only through home video sales that the film finally found an audience that could appreciate it (for all its exploding heads and visceral gore, among other reasons).

But just having a cult isn’t a good enough reason to continue a franchise, especially when the writer / director, Cronnenberg, isn’t attached to work on the sequel. Despite this, Peter David (who had worked on the original film, along with many other Cronnenberg movies) thought that making a sequel was a great idea, whether or not Cronnenberg was involved. He, along with contacts at Malo Film, bought the rights to Scanners and set about making a sequel. Several sequels, in fact, although those would all come from the (relative) direct-to-video success of Scanners II: The New Order.

But here’s the thing: the lack of Cronnenberg – his vision, his ideas – means that the film was already fighting an uphill battle to gain some kind of relevance. Whatever idea was pursued, it had to be good enough to justify continuing a story that, for ten years, had remained wrapped up and complete. And, frankly, Scanners II: The New Order doesn’t have the kind of story or ideas to sustain a sequel. Hell, most of what it does that’s interesting is simply borrowed from the first Scanners. Scanners II: The New Order is a watered down, less interesting version of the first film, struggling to even justify its own existence, let alone tell a convincing, interesting story.

The film opens with cops tracking down a scanner, Peter Drak (Raoul Trujillo), who had just trashed an arcade with the powers of his mind. Driven half-insane by the voices in his head that he can’t stop (all the voices coming from the minds of the people around him), Peter struggles daily just to be able to survive. The cops capture him and take him back to a lab to help him, study him, and teach him to control and use his powers. In part they do this by hooking him on Formula Eph2, a drug that calms the minds of scanners but also slowly kills them. Eventually.

While Peter is getting treatment we then meet David Kellum (David Hewlett), a veterinary intern studying for his degree alongside fellow student Alice Leonardo (Isabelle Mejias). The two of them hit it off and start dating, but while at a store one day, David ends up using his mental powers to fight off some robbers, accidentally killing one of them. When a police officer, Commander John Forrester (Yvan Ponton), shows up to talk to David it’s revealed that he doesn’t want to arrest the guy, he wants to use them. David’s powers as a scanner could be useful to the police, or at least Forrester’s own plans. David has to learn to embrace who he is while also figuring out who he can trust now that his secret has been revealed.

Credit where it’s due, Scanners II: The New Order does at least take the time to try and think about what the implications would be for a world where a not insubstantial portion of the population had telepathic and telekinetic powers. If there were people that had these abilities then, naturally, there would be people that would want to use and exploit these powers. We sort of saw that in the first film where the evil scanner leader (played by the always amazing Michael Ironside) wanted to build his own scanner order to control their world. The second film posits the idea that someone that wasn’t a scanner would want to try the same thing. I get it, and it works okay as a plot thread.

The issue is that, outside of this one grain of a new concept, the film doesn’t have anything else interesting to say. The events of the sequel, while not directly traced over the original movie, still feel like a distant copy of the original. A copy of a copy where everything is so watered down you can still get the impression of the image without any of the details that made that first version so interesting. Scanners II: The New Order has less to say, far less impressive effects, and even less in the way of scares or horror that it barely qualifies as thrilling at all.

Some of the blame does rest on the cast, who are by no means up to the task of trying to play these characters and make them feel real. While David Hewlett, Deborah Raffin, Yvan Ponton, Isabelle Mejias, and Raoul Trujillo are all fine actors, playing a scanner basically amounts to staring at someone with a grimace on your face while they try to pretend their brains are being hacked. By and large this is silly and goofy and it takes a really credible, interesting actor to make it seem like anything more than a dumb lark. These performers were not up to the task.

I do want to single out Trujillo because while he wasn’t really good at playing a scanner he was fantastic at being a scenery chewing heavy. I feel like if the film had been better, if the effects had been more solid, there’s a good chance Trujillo’s performance could have been much better. He seems to relish every scene he’s in, overacting his character for the cheap seats, and while it’s silly as hell he does at least bring real energy to the role. It’s the wrong energy for this lame, low wattage film, but it’s something and I did appreciate every time he was on screen so he could taunt the good guys and make a menacing face. It was something.

Of course, good or bad acting, it doesn’t really matter since the story is absolute crap. The evil Commander uses David’s powers for personal gain, but almost immediately everyone starts to ask what’s going on, who is this Commander rising through the ranks, and why do all these bodies keep dropping around him. A lame attempt is made to frame David, but when the whole plan falls apart it all feels obvious. The film doesn’t do enough groundwork to make the cop drama interesting or investing, nor does it work hard to make the Commander seem like someone smart enough to pull off a scheme like this. It’s going through the motions of a smarter film, without any of the intelligence in the writing to back that up. Scanners II: The New Order is a dumb movie that desperately hopes to be smart but fails tragically at it.

As I find myself saying with a lot of bad movies, I do think there’s probably some thread of an idea that could have been fleshed out to work better. In a different version, with a different script, we might have gotten a tense thriller with the scanner, David, slowly feeling the walls closing in on him as the Commander plays him like a fiddle, using the scanner and then throwing him away when he’s rung every bit of power he can out of the boy. That’s not this film, nor is Scanners II: The New Order in any way interesting enough to pull off any kind of story half as interesting as that. This sequel is boring, tired, and not at all thrilling. While I don’t want to say that any sequel is totally worthless just because the previous film didn’t need one, Scanners II: The New Order doesn’t do much to justify its existence on any level. It’s a franchise extender, not a franchise builder, and it shows.