SCANNERS II: THE NEW ORDER (1991)

 





PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Probably the best thing about this sequel to David Cronenberg's SCANNERS is its total independence from the original film. Granted, Cronenberg's script arranged matters so that all the principal characters were placed in a position that a later raconteur would have it difficult to revive any of them. Accordingly, director Christian Duguay and writer B.J. Nelson start over with new characters that have also been given devastating psychic powers by the experimental drug Ephemerol.

Duguay et al do a decent job of turning out most of the kinetic effects a viewer might want from a SCANNERS sequel: car chases, family confusions and exploding heads. Intern David Kellum (David Hewlett) finds himself drawn into a major conspiracy in which an evil power-seeker seeks to use Scanners to help him gain political power. In the process of finding out the truth, David learns that he's the child of the original film's main hero and heroine, and that he has a sister of whom he never knew (played by token American actress Deborah Raffin, awash in Canadian performers). The most memorable performance is that of Raoul Trujillo, a nasty Scanner who revels in using his powers to serve the main villain's evil designs.

There's a smidgen of sociological content in that the viewer knows that the villain is evil because he wants to be "tough on crime," which everyone in movie-land is code for "evil fascist." NEW ORDER is a perfectly adequate sequel in every way, and if that isn't very impressive on some levels, it's certainly better than the ghastly infestation of such sequel-serials as those of HOWLING and CHILDREN OF THE CORN.


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