Scanner Cop

1994/Canada/95 minutes

Tagline-Imagine a cop who can read your mind..then blow it away.

A newly recruited cop in the Los Angeles Police Department Sam Staziak is faced with a dilemma when he is called upon to use his erstwhile controlled ‘scanner’ powers to discover the truth behind a series of cop killings by seemingly ordinarily citizens with no prior criminal records. Scanners are individuals with extremely strong psychic powers who can telepathically communicate with other persons around them, and can literally scan the thoughts running in their heads. The problem of course is that the scanners may at any time face sensory overload if they hear too many thoughts and go insane, which is why they use drugs called Ephemeral to suppress their abilities.

However, in this movie (which is the fourth unofficial entry in the Scanners series and the first of the Scanner Cop series) Commander Peter Harrigan directs Sam, who is his adoptive son, to stop using the drugs so that he can scan the killers (a different killer for each set of cop murders) and find out the trigger for the acts of mindless brutality. Though Sam at first refuses thinking back upon the incidents leading to his father’s death and his own adoption by the commander (his father ran out of the drug Ephemeral one night and then went crazy hearing explosive number of stray thoughts of other people in the flat; hearing his screams the janitor calls the police who attempt to stop him, a shootout ensues and the father is killed; one of the cops present is Harrigan who subsequently adopts him).

However, when their police academy janitor who was worked quietly for 12 years kills Sam's partner and two more cops, Sam decides to get on the case and find out the mastermind of these planned murders once and for all. When he scans one of the detained killers, he finds an image of a huge monster imprinted in the killer’s mind which resembles the image printed on a deck of cards found in a crime scene. This  leads nowhere as the manufacturer has sold thousands of identical cards all over the city. The first break comes when the killer commits suicide and the doctor Joan Alden (Darlanne Fluegel, Relative Fear and Freeway) conducting the autopsy finds large quantities of a hallucinogenic drug injected into his brain;  Sam conjectures that the killer and other men were shown pictures of their targets and their greatest fears or past horrific experiences interchangeably so as to deceive them into thinking that the target policemen were actually those fearsome creatures or experiences. Joan states that although it is scientifically impossible to create programmed assassins, the trick would work if the chosen killer believed the real target to be someone (or something) else.

In order to protect the police force, Commander  Harrigan issues general instructions about their safety and directs them to in plainclothes for a while. However, the masterminds are alerted to this change and shift the trigger from a police uniform to the police badge. Their plan works when a cop’s wife who is afraid of giant insects is jokingly shown the badge by her husband, and imagining him to be the insect imprinted in her brain, she stabs him to death. His colleague discovers the crime and during another scanning session with Sam, the whereabouts of the true killer are revealed to him. Sam arrives at the place, which is a tarot reading parlour run by a mysterious woman called Zena and attempts to scan her when she reads his future. Zena becomes alarmed and orders him off, but before leaving he observes a man with Zena. Using rudimentary computer animation techniques involving shapes and lines and a set of hairstyles and eye shapes, Sam draws the face of the man he saw with Zena. Harrigan then recognises him as Dr. Krench, a rouge scientist who was found carrying out unauthorized brain experiments and dismissed from service in a hospital. Later the police got clues that he was holed up in a secret hideaway and was still conducting those experiments with teenagers by luring them with the promise of drugs that would ‘open up their minds’. The police attempted to arrest him from this hideout but instead he is severely injured in a shootout. His helper Zena escaped unhurt. The commander also tells them that Krench was taken to the Chatram Mental Institution where he underwent brain operation and survived, only to escape a year before the horrific cop killings begin. Believing the lead shown by Sam, Peter orders a team headed by his right hand man Lieutenant Harry Brown to search and arrest the man.

However Krench and Zena go one step ahead of the police team and brainwash Brown into killing Harrigan. Sam finds his actions suspicious and manages to save his father but not before he is wounded in the heart. At the hospital where the commander is being treated, Sam overhears Zena’s conversation with Krench informing him about the commander’s location. He immediately goes down to confront Zena, and on seeing him, she runs away and is hit by a truck. As she lies in a state of limbo between life and death, Sam scans her brain and finds out the evil scientist’s hideout. Then in a silly and contrived sequence, both Zena and Sam leave their bodies and run through corridors containing old men in cells with various diseases and with some undergoing scalp operations. Zena hides herself behind prison bars and refuses to tell Sam anything about the scientist, instead mocking that she would meet him in hell. Then as he begins to scan her brain, her veins grow bulbous and her head explodes, in a clear echo of the infamous head bursting scene in the first Scanners movie (1981).

Sam tells the Joan to guard his father and rushes to the tarot parlour, where Krench has secreted himself in a chamber beneath the corridor leading from the front room. The room is designed typically as a scientist’s experiment room would be expected in science-fiction movies and TV shows, with dozens of pipettes and test tubes, burning fluids and chemical compounds, with the addition here of several computer systems and a huge projector which is used to bewilder the victim(the random cop killers) with rapidly interchanging shots of the targets, triggers and the object of fear of loath. Opposite the projector is a chair where these victims are tied and after being injected with hallucinogenic fluid, are forced to watch the images which turn them into zombie –like killers. Krench injects Sam with the fluid and tries to brainwash him into eliminating his father. Sam outsmarts Krench by scanning him, and in the process, the computers in the room burst into flames. Both escape however, and Sam rushes to the operation room where Krench is masquerading as a surgeon so as to slice up the incapacitated commander. Sam again uses his scanning powers and wreaks havoc to the operating room and using huge mental exertion, kills the renegade scientist. In the last scene, Peter Harrigan is shown recovering as  his family gather around him.

This is a solid and enjoyable entry to the Scanner series which is skillfully executed by director Pierre David from a refreshing premise. The music is toned down but ever present and slightly ominous, while the action is fast paced enough to sustain interest throughout. The acting is reasonable from the lead players, especially from Darlanne Fluegel as the concerned doctor who knows that the killings are anything but ordinary but has moral qualms about allowing scanning sessions with the chosen killers, as is evident when she stops one midway when the woman who kills her husband starts hemorrhaging on constant mental pressure. One good thing is that the film never has light interludes in between the heated-up moments which further emphasizes the dark mood and atmosphere which envelops the characters’ lives as they are faced with an evil force at work that keeps its cool distance from the police, and yet targets them with a peculiar device. The device is simple but highly effective, as the cops are gunned down or stabbed by persons whom they know and interact with on a daily basis. The next attack and victim is unknown, but its somewhere close to them, which makes the need to stop the rash of murders even more urgent, but the task definitely more deadly. Richard Grove is also excellent as the father torn between the desire to shield his son from sensory overload which may  kill Sam and the need to get to the bottom of the apparently irrational and unrelated cop killings.

The movie was released on VHS and Laserdisc by Republic Pictures Home Video  and later on DVD in 2007 by Seville Pictures in its home country Canada. I have a dutch release DVD from Dutch Filmworks which is presented in widescreen in original English audio with optional Dutch subtitles, and the print is clean and free of speckles other than necessary grain to support a filmic appearance. Highly recommended.

                                     Arabella The Black Angel/Arabella l'angelo nero/ 1989/Italy

Deliriously trashy thriller about a buxom brunette who is an incorrigible nymphomaniac. Arabella is a beautiful 30 something woman, rich and married but unfortunately suffering from a void in her marriage. It turns out that her husband Francesco Veronese is paralyzed beneath the waist due to a romantic scene gone awry (Arabella went down on her husband after their marriage while he has driving a car and in the ensuing 20 seconds of ecstasy, her husband rammed into another car). Though she seems to care for him, she needs lot of sex too and thus heads out every night to a local S & M bar where participants engage in bizarre and kinky acts. Arabella joins in a threesome with two dudes in tight leather pants and moans that she’d do anything for them. Unbeknownst to her, a sleazy reporter is following and clicking pictures of Arabella as she goes about her secret mission.

The same night, the club is raided and a vice cop viciously rapes Arabella calling her a  whore. She retaliates by calling him a bastard and then dropping her purse as she heads back home. Just another night for Arabella I would say !

The cop returns to see her the next day, apologising for calling her a whore as she's actually rich and cultured. But he's clear on his terms that either Arabella give him a second helping or he goes report to her husband. Arabella accedes to the former term and takes him to a utility shed where they start getting off pretty hard. The husband however catches them and in a fit of shock, Arabella clubs the cop to death and they both bury the body in the backyard. Afterwards they make love and Arabella apologies for her indescretion and promises to be never unfaithful again. He however encourages her to fool around with other men so as to provide fodder for his latest novel which is well past its promised publication date. 

Meanwhile, a black gloved killer is goring people to death with a pair of scissors-first is the reporter who figures a connection between Arabella and the missing cop as he had witnessed the rape, and he leaves a message for a mystery correspondent about her possible involvement. Then Arabella's latest lover is dispatched by being castrated by the killer (ouch !) and the next day's paper is full of lurid details and the picture of the dead man (the castration included, mind). Arabella becomes a little worried about the news and begins to think she carries doom around her. Her husband however consoles her and asks her not to worry but continue on her affairs undeterred. 

The inspector investigating the crimes has ghosts of her own past-when she was little, her mother had similarly castrated the father, a repressed secret that brings forth nightmares. When she reveals her disturbing story to her lesbian lover and ambitious assistant in office, the latter woman publishes a scandalous story in the papers which leads to inspector losing the case and being humiliated. The killer calls the inspector and sets up an interview promising hints on the victims and the crime. The assistant masked as inspector goes to a park, where after fighting with her former lover (what a cat fight they have, rolling in dust, pulling each other's hair out and calling beautiful names-"You filthy bull dyke" and "I won't take you back even if you begged on your knees" ) she is viciously slashed in the neck and her body is bloodily (and lovingly) caressed by the killer in black gloves and the infamous scissors.

Shifting track to Arabella, it is shown that her husband mail orders black lingerie for her and calling her "black angel" requests her to conduct another sexual encounter at a seedy joint called Freak Boy's Town so that she can recount her experiences to him later and help him in completing his novel. She agrees reluctantly and finds a young man with whom she proceeds to have sex. Her husband meanwhile is shown to have been lying about his handicap and in fact has fully recovered. He follows Arabella every night and watches her torrid conduct in order to get a first hand account and pen his ideas more realistically in the book. As Arabella leaves her lover for that night, her husband confronts her and maddened with lust on seeing the vicarious scene of pleasure, he almost forces himself on her. Then the killer attacks Francesco and is finally revealed to be his mother Marta. She has stabbed her son by mistake, imagining him to one of Arabella's lover instead and stunned with shock, she spares Arabella who is institutionalised. The motive behind her crimes is as inane as the movie itself-the mother wants to "protect" her delicate son from the depravity surrounding him (his wife is a nympho and his step-sister, the inspector called Gina Fowler is a lesbian), so she goes about killing all her lovers. Nothing is mentioned about what happened to the mother, but in the last scene it is shown that the freshly released Arabella goes back to her wild nympho ways, completely unaffected by her family tragedy or her recent institutionalisation !

The movie doesn't make a dint of sense and the acting and dubbing is so awful that I couldn't help chuckle now and then especially when Arabella went all solemn and tried to show concern for her dead lovers. In all other scenes, she's perfectly content to striptease in black lacy lingerie and satiate her husband or her other myriad lovers. Anyhow, the good thing is that Arabella is a devoted creature as her focus is really on her husband's welfare and success and her rape or sexual humiliation or the death of her lovers are only ordinary hurdles she encounters everyday. Maybe there's emancipation for Arabella too as in the end she not only has a clean chit for the ugly events surrounding the murders, but also gets to enjoy her earlier rich lifestyle with loads of fooling around left to do !

Steel and Lace 1991 (US, 94 minutes)

Tagline- Shes’ tough. She’s tender. She’s all human. She’s all machine

Choice  words-   “Pretty, very pretty” (every time Gaily kills an enemy )

         “I don’t have to take this shit from a ghost”-when Gaily confronts the last victim Danny at his office

Review-

Pretty standard fare about a vengeful cyborg who goes after her rapists to seek retributive justice after death. Gaily was earlier a beautiful and vulnerable young girl who was gang-raped by five men (one of whom was known to her) and thereafter fails to get them punished since the main culprit sets up his other friends as alibis. A distraught Gaily commits suicide by falling off from the court complex rooftop and her brother Albert, a former NASA robotics engineer, takes it upon himself to avenge her death by recreating her as a cyborg with the face and form of a stunning woman who would manage to charm all men. Five years after her suicide, the five rapists have become successful partners in a real estate business which prospers through blackmail and extortion. Gaily adopts the technique of seducing these men and then transforming into her old self and killing them in innovative ways-drilling stomachs and crotches during make-out sessions and perforating necks after business meetings. As the rapists start falling dead, the suspicion rests on Daniel “Danny” who has already alienated his friends through his greed and megalomaniac need to control the business empire to the exclusion of others.

The special effects and gore are minimal, though the film does offer some interesting moments and subtexts, one where Gaily the killer machine masquerades as CIA agent Spoon to lure Toby, one of the offenders, by offering him witness protection and possible suspension of  sentence if he collects evidence against Danny and deposes against him in court. Once outside the shady bar where they held their secret talk, the agent transforms into Gaily and then displays her paraphernalia of metal tools and decapitates Toby. In her first stage of transformation, we can see the expanding breasts of the agent with the male physique which was a bit off-putting and reminded me of the last scene in Frankenhooker where the male protagonist is killed by his similarly ‘recreated from the dead’ girlfriend with different body parts of street hookers, which include the face and body of a man and huge heaving breasts of a woman! From the subtext point, the interesting bit comes in when the undead Gaily questions her brother about her previous life, her friends and personality and he rebuffs her interest by asking her to focus on her mission, possibly out of fear that Gaily would get distracted from her programmed course if she develops feelings and emotions. Another intriguing portion came midway through the movie, when Albert dismantles Gaily and feeds her memory chip into a huge computer (it was the early 90’s remember) and watches with intent at the mens' faces as they are dying after being attacked by Gaily. This was similar to two other movies I’ve seen before, Peeping Tom (1960) and 10 to Midnight (1983) where the cameras are deliberately placed close to the victim’s faces during their last moments to capture the palpable fear and terror and to signify the perverse pleasures of the killer. In this case too, Albert watches the lurid images of gory deaths as though he is obtaining a vicarious sense of satisfaction and victory by viewing their actual deaths rather than having merely seen them convicted.

Apart from these few thought provoking moments, the movie drags on from scene to scene without much energy and without invoking any sense of enjoyment or involvement in the viewer. There is the thick headed detective Dunn and his annoyingly inquisitive girlfriend Alison who tries to link the recent killings with the suicide of Gaily all those years back, but cannot get anyone to believe her and has no proof of her doubts till she catches Gaily at the scene of murder and tries to follow her in order to get to the root of the mystery. Perplexingly, Gaily doesn’t kill the nosey Alison and instead takes her hostage as they go on their last killing trip. While Alison can’t stop the murder of Danny, her cop boyfriend and his troop does show up in the end and tries to apprehend the brother-sister duo, but instead give them enough space and time to commit suicide by recreating the Gaily death scene by stating-“There is only one safe place now !”. This last scene has to be highlight of the movie, for instead of stopping Gaily and her brother from killing themselves, they simply allow them to go ahead with their plans. I wonder if their action (read inactivity) was prompted by a sense of apprehension that the investigation would have involved a cyborg which would have surely been a  frustrating job for Dunn and his associates !

The film was released on video-cassette by Fries Home Video and is also available on Laserdisc from Image Entertainment, but till date it hasn’t been released on DVD or Blu-Ray.