TRANCERS 6 (2002)

  

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

"How low can you go" often seems to apply as well to film reviewing as to limbo games. Just when I think I've found a film I can dismiss as "a black hole of worthlessness," as I did with TERMINATION MAN, someone somewhere manages to make a sucking void that's even blacker and more worthless.

TRANCERS 6 is probably bad for the same reason as TM. Some producer observed that Full Moon Entertainment hadn't done anything with its "Trancers" franchise for eight years, and so offered to make a new film in the series for X thousand dollars. I would imagine that even a B-film guy like Tim Thomerson would have been outside this filmmaker's range, even if the actor had not distanced himself with the last subpar entries in the series. 

So TRANCERS 6 plays out like what would have happened if Ted V. Mikels had been given control of an installment-- lots of pointless, low-energy violence, enacted largely by performers with minimal film experience, and most of whom show no capacity for improvement. (TRANCERS 6 does boast one long-time jobbing actor, a Robert Donavan, whose extensive credits go back to the eighties, but I couldn't even tell you what he did, because the flick was such a bore-fest.)

Since Thomerson's character Jack Deth had the schtick of downloading his future-self into the bodies of his ancestors, the filmmakers didn't need any particular actor to play Deth. They did however need an actor, and they didn't get one in Zette Sullivan. She plays plays "Jo Deth," the 20th-century daughter of the time-hopping hero, and Jack, not seen on-camera, possesses her body in order to prevent yet another unmemorable madman unleashing zombie-like "trancers" on a populace.

The earlier "Trancers" films were all routine B-movies, and one could blink at the moral dubiousness of the hero taking over his ancestor's bodies to achieve his exploits. But not only is the actress incapable of pulling off anything like the character of Jack Deth, the film can't get anything but dumb sex-jokes out of the prospect of a future-father possessing his daughter's body. This transgressive idea might have worked in a black comedy, but here it translates into boredom.

The villains are even less memorable than the hero, and all I can recall is that the main Big Bad is female, which gives the film the chance for a concluding catfight. But again, the conflict is so low-energy that even Ted Mikels would have been ashamed of this one. Not surprisingly, there have been no feature-length "Trancers" film since this turkey.