corran-horn-1
Note: I do not really feel my review contains any real spoilers, but it is a review none the less, and reviews must reference the movie that's being reviewed. ---To save his daughter from being on the losing end of a knife fight, Jack Deth is once again sent down the line, and in the process has to cope with the usual temporal, (as well as gender) shock while synging trancers.General consensus is that Trancers 6 is pretty bad, usually cited for a slew of reasons. While I'll admit the film does have its shortcomings, I'll also point out that as a Trancer movie, let alone a Full Moon product, this should have been expected.Firstly, I think deep down, everyone realizes that the Trancers series was pretty much in decline in the first place. Tim Thomerson says in the Videozone for Trancers 4 a statement along the lines of Helen Hunt off doing movies for millions while he is stuck there doing Trancers. The comment may have been said in jest, but it does illustrate that there is definitely a visible decline in the series. The fact that Trancers 4 and 5 should've been one movie in the first place (how Kill Bill-esquire) shows that series was starting to be stretched thin.However, Trancers 6 is remarkably refreshing. The time travel this time is a throw back to the original Trancers – no TCL chamber here. The plot is a throwback to Trancers 2: Trancer farming but with less Richard Lynch and more… uhm.. meteor? (Side note: a meteor that has the power to bend the will of people? Do I detect Maniac Mansion here? I doubt it, but that was a sweet game. Anywho, bad digression there). The aliens and the meteor tie back to Jack's implied adventures through time-space-dimensions-etc. that are post Trancers 3 and possibly post Trancers 5. All these incorporations solidify Trancers 6 within the canon of the Trancers series.Trancers 6 even expands upon previous elements of Trancers. In Trancers 6 we see deformed Trancers, an alternate method to trance the squids (via meteor gun), and even a more powerful trancer (the tranced Mark who can stop bullets, unfazed). The movie shows technical competency itself. No boom mikes visible, a claim that Trancers 1 cannot even make! Actually, it is quite surprising what movie was spun with what little resources and budget the director had. You can scoff at the lifted footage of Tim Thomerson from previous Trancers movies edited together in the beginning, but working with what the director has, it's actually pulled off quite well! The only real shortcomings in the technical department are the special effects. Yes, the trancer's plunge to his death was pretty bad. Any sort of explosion or laser looked pretty cut and pasted in. However, lack of any resources for a proper post-production would explain this (see the director's website on this detail), but also at the same time, I must harkin back to the quality of Trancers movies as a whole – the special effects have never really been that good! The image of the movie is nice and crisp; it looks like an actual movie! This is actually a quite surprising quality of Full Moon in the early 2000s – during the same year (2002), Death Bed came out from Full Moon, a monstrosity that looks like home video porn. I am grateful that Trancers 6 looks the way it does!This is all fine and dandy, but lets boil to the root of what Trancers is about, and why there may be reasons for reservations for #6. Tim Thomerson is so synonymous with Trancers that not having him in #6 is a risky venture. However, the powers that be said no, so we do not get Tim Thomerson back as Jack Deth. This hindrance is dealt with rather brilliantly I think – have him sent down the line into his daughter. For starters, it's a nice fresh face, a clean slate. In Trancers 5, the evil doppelganger of Jack Deth comments that Jack Deth was getting pretty old. That was 1994; this being 2002, Tim Thomerson himself would be older. Sure, it could work – some people like 80-billion year old Harrison Ford donning the fedora of Indiana Jones again, so why not Tim Thomerson. Face it – for whatever reasons, Tim cannot be Jack Deth forever. Jo is a nice fresh face, and she actually pulls off the witticisms and one liners that Jack normally does quite well. In fact, while being in a female body, many of the comments take on an extra weight of humour. Examples of Jo complimenting the arse of Shauna, or the line of "not into guys" said to Mark. While this type of humour has been done before in such movies as Switch, but it takes on an extra sense of comedy since now it's playing with the already established conventions solidified by Tim Thomerson. I feel the biggest flaw of the movie is that not enough time is spent with Jo, spatting Jack Deth remarks. In the middle of the movie she more or less disappears – tied up or locked in a cell or sorts as we cut to exposition elsewhere. I feel that more time should've been spent on Jo acting like Jack, which would allow for more acceptance of the new character. I am hoping that Zette Sullivan starts to appear in more movies (no movies since Trancers 6-?), because I think she filled some pretty big shoes quite nicely. So overall, I feel Trancers 6 is quite the worthy entry to the Trancers canon. I don't believe it deserves the dismissal it is currently receiving. It's pretty good!
The Creeper
I had been waiting a long time for this movie to come out, as I have long been a fan of Charles Band/Full Moon Pictures. When I saw it, I was amazed. Of the Trancers Films I've seen (I, III, and VI), I would say this one was the best. Even though we are in Part 6, the action still feels like it's fresh off the burner. Also, I was delighted to see that the plot had a bit of twist in it, of how the whole "Trancers" theme was a little different than in the others (I refuse to say anything else on the plot, as I don't want to spoil it).Great Movie!!!I Give it 10 out of 10Fans of Movies like this should Check out Puppet Master, Slumber Party Massacre, Skinned Alive, Sleep Away Camp, and other Full Moon Pictures flicks. For other recommendations, check out the other comments I have sent in by clicking on my name above this comment section.
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Full Moon's budget just keep getting lower, so it's kind of sad to see one of their best series being continued on a budget lower than what Nicole Kidman spends a year on sun block. The TRANCERS films involve Jack Deth, a Bogart-ish cop from the future who keeps getting sent back in time to deal with Trancers, zombie-like former humans, whose actions virtually destroyed the time-line Deth originates from. To time travel, Deth must inhabit the body of one of his ancestors all of whom, at least until this entry, look just like actor Tim Thomerson.This time around, Full Moon couldn't afford Thomerson, so they open with some stock footage of him, from previous films in the series, and then send him back in time to inhabit the body of the daughter he never knew he had fathered during one of his visits to the 80s. If you're a follower of the TRANCERS series, this all makes pretty good sense, as the third film did introduce just such a child.Anyway, entry #6 takes place in a low rent version of the present and Deth's daughter is played by diminuitive (5 ft tall) Zette Sullivan, a serious little cutie who does a nice job of playing a tough "guy" in a girl's body. Sullivan is much of the show here as she effectively mimics Thomerson's style and earns a few smiles by playing the uncomfortable macho male in a woman's body role.There's a couple of nice action sequences and some OK, bargain basement special effects and makeup. Most of the cast is fine and it all flies by enjoyably, if forgettably, enough. If Full Moon ever gets a decent budget again, they could do a lot worse than to continue this series with spunky Sullivan, maybe even team her up with Thomerson, and let this film's director, Jay Woelfel, take a shot at it. If he can do this well with next-to-no-money, I'm guessing he could make a pretty good film with a budget featuring more numbers than a zip code. DVD owners can see this on a double-feature disc with the first TRANCERS film, which features a young Helen Hunt (who was in entries 1-3) as the woman who will eventually be the mother of Deth's daughter in this entry. Jeez, this is getting confusing.
