TheRetroCritic

Only David Cronenberg could make us take exploding heads seriously. Not to mention make the out-there concept of mind scanning believable! Then again, out there is kind of Cronenberg's whole deal. After all this is the guy behind such wacko creations as Crash and Videodrome . If anything, Scanners is one of his most straight-forward ventures. Scanners is sci-fi/horror done right: from the tense, unsettling opening scene to the final bloody showdown, this is a ride through a dark and disturbing near future that's hard to forget. Michael Ironside is particularly good as the demented, powerful vilain Stephen Lack's somewhat bland scanner is up against and The Prisoner 's Patrick McGoohan offers fine support as the doctor who trains him. Overall, Scanners is an atmospheric, often chilling sci-fi story with some welcome gore and impressive special effects. One of Cronenberg's best.

It's no secret that sequels very rarely live up to the original. Occasionally, a sequel is actually so bad it can even single-handedly destroy all that was good about the first film, and what better example than Highlander 2? Never a big fan of Highlander myself, I never really understood what the big deal was with the first film and why people were such big fans of it when it came out. That said, in retrospect it's easy to understand its charm: the originality of the premise and the creation of this entire mythology from scratch is a welcome departure from the countless monster/vampire movies which came out at the time. Sure the whole thing was always silly, overblown and inherently flawed but people didn't care, they just wanted to see a bad French actor kick ass with a sword, pretending to be Scottish the entire time, heads being chopped off, references to Queen and lots of electricity. LOTS of electricity. I get that. A sequel can either build on an original concep