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.