Watch Trancers II: The Return of Jack Deth For Free

A Masterpiece!

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The original "Trancers" had a wit and spark to it which in turn made it one of the most inspired and enjoyable low-budget sci-fi sleepers from the 80s. This rather forced belated sequel tries a tad too hard to recapture the spirit of the first one with strictly middling results. Tim Thomerson still has the right cynical stuff as Jack Deth, who this time fights Whistler's brother E.D. Ward (smoothly played by Richard Lynch) who has started his own organization called Green World that's really a sinister front for a trancer farm. Alas, Charles Band's pedestrian direction and Jackson Barr's needlessly convoluted script both result in a very uneven on and off pace: The story really plods in the first two thirds and the initial action set pieces are blandly staged, but fortunately things pick up to a good degree in the pretty exciting last third. A worthy cast of familiar B-movie faces keeps it watchable enough: Martine Beswicke as the evil Nurse Trotter, a goateed Jeffrey Combs as Wardo's antsy assistant Dr. Pyle, Art LeFleur as Deth's hard-nosed boss McNulty, and Barbara Crampton as talk show host Sadie Brady. Helen Hunt is her usual sweet and charming self as the spunky Lena, the adorable Megan Ward adds some much-needed vitality as Jack's feisty first wife Alice Stillwell, Bill Manard is a hoot as reformed drunk Hap Ashby, Sonny Carl Davis contributes an amusing turn as wacky hospital orderly Rabbit, and late, great veteran character actor John Davis Chandler has a nifty bit part as a baseball-playing wino. However, the humor is hit or miss: A sizable amount of Jack's one-liners fall flat, although the squabbling between Lena and Alice does provide a few mildly funny moments. Both Adolfo Bartoli's slick cinematography and the moody synth score by Phil Davies and Mark Ryder are up to par. Acceptable, but it should have been so much better.

This actually started out with a good idea - essentially bringing Jack's wife back from the dead through time travel tricks, and bringing Whistler's protégé (in this case, his brother) to seek revenge and rebuild the Trancer army. But from there, the movie just suffers from a whole legion of little problems that are just noticeable enough, and they add up to just be annoying. First, while the drugs and the rebuilding the army make for a good sequel, the whole mental asylum/environmental front seem more appropriate for an episode of a TV series than a feature film. Second, the fact that Leena seemed to ignore the fact that Alice actually was Jack's wife who had died and instead treated her as just some woman he was cheating on her with was really bad writing. Third, could they have please not made Alice into a complete nympho, wanting to get into Jack's pants every other moment? Fourth, while a 9-year old girl sounding like a middle aged man is great comic relief, a 15-year old girl trying to sound like a middle aged man just sounds like a typical 15-year old girl. Finally (last one, I promise), what was the director's obsession with having practically every line be delivered right into the camera? Totally blew the storytelling.Still, it was a good effort, and it's not like the huge nosedive that the series took starting with Trancers IV.

Since the 70s, writer/producer/director Charles Band has been responsible for literally hundreds of science-fiction, fantasy and horror B-movies. Some of them are wonderful examples of how to use a tiny budget to maximum effect; many of them are pretty bad. Trancers (1985) was one of those rare gems.A Terminator style tale of time-travel and action, Trancers saw Tim Thomerson playing Jack Deth, a future cop given the task of tracking down bad-guy Whistler, who travels into the past by inhabiting the body of an ancestor. Whistler is capable of controlling other humans with his psychic powers, converting them into obedient zombies (the 'trancers' of the title), and attempts to alter the course of history by killing off the ancestors of the leaders of the future. Jack follows him to 1985, determined to stop him.In this 1991 sequel, Jack is still living in 1985. Having destroyed Whistler, he has settled down and married Leena (Helen Hunt), the young woman who helped him succeed in the first movie. But, for Jack, things don't stay calm for long, and trouble appears in the form of Whistler's brother, E.D. Wardo, who is trying to build a trancer army.Trancers II lacks the charm and simplicity of the original and is a huge disappointment considering how good the original was. The story is difficult to pick up if you haven't seen the first film (or at least not for a long while), and there is loads of unimpressive action and a few poor special effects. Gone is the inventiveness and wit that made Trancers so much fun; instead we get some cheesy one-liners and a script that feels like it was written on-the-fly.About the only reason I can give for recommending this film to fans of the genre is the cast, which boasts many names that will be familiar to followers of sci-fi and horror movies: Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Richard Lynch, Martine Beswicke. Unfortunately, most of them seemed to be having an 'off day' whilst filming Trancers II, and performances are mediocre at best.The Trancers series obviously has its fans; four further sequels have since been churned out. Unless the quality has taken up massive upward swing, I can't imagine them being any good.

This is a big step down after the surprisingly enjoyable original. This sequel isn't nearly as fun as part one, and it instead spends too much time on plot development. Tim Thomerson is still the best thing about this series, but his wisecracking is toned down in this entry. The performances are all adequate, but this time the script lets us down. The action is merely routine and the plot is only mildly interesting, so I need lots of silly laughs in order to stay entertained during a "Trancers" movie. Unfortunately, the laughs are few and far between, and so, this film is watchable at best.