Trancers

Oh yeah, I'm satisfied with what I saw. It's a fast-paced B-movie that ticks along nicely, it has some pretty good moments when it's funny too. The main character is appropriately tough, and Helen Hunt is still young and quite innocent. Yeah, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, plus the concept is quite good and not completely worn out. (10/19/2015)

On the one hand, a lot of B-movies blatantly rip off their A-list counterparts, but on the other hand, they are sometimes an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Trancers is a shining example of this. On the surface, it may copy Blade Runner (a hard-boiled whodunit that starts in a neo-noir future) and Terminator (a villain travels back in time to the 1980s to kill the ancestors of his adversaries), but inside it all, it manages to create its own world and infuse it with a heavy dose of previously untested ideas. For example, you travel back in time by being transported into the body of your ancestor after being injected with a drug. The main villain attacks using hypnotized people. And the action scenes are slowed down by special time-manipulating clocks. Sure, we've seen all of this in later A-grade movies, but I wonder where they got it from? The plot overall doesn't make much sense, and the main draw is the aforementioned small ideas that the film plays with in a very funny way. For example, when the police chief from the future goes to the past, he is transported into the body of an eight-year-old girl in pajamas, who then comes to shake the main character down at night with a Dirty Harry look on her face. On the other hand, there are a number of moments that are obviously not meant to be funny and are unintentionally so. But thanks to a great central cast (Tim Thomerson is hard-boiled to the bone and the chemistry between him and the likeable Helen Hunt works as it should), it's a fine entertainment that, at a modest 76 minutes, passes by perhaps a little too quickly. (07/19/2018)