Trancers (1984)/Revisit

**It was great to get captioning on Pluto TV for the film. This was such a delightful revisit**

 So I used to scan my uncle's VHSs on a shelf in the late 80s, just so curious with my eyes wide at all the tapes, carefully cultivated and set up so neatly. And there it was, on a videotape alongside something with John Candy and some other early 80s scifi, or perhaps Caddyshack...Trancers. Yep, the HBO intro through the city as that music pumped my adrenaline towards the opening credits, and that Trancers score kicks up with that bright blue aesthetic...my uncle always relented and let me borrow his tapes, haha.

You have that red and blue neon mixed with 30s/40s smoky film noir, with a scuzzy diner and those cars with "future architecture" and my eleven year old brain was on overload. Oh, but you add Tim Thomerson, with that scar across the face, take-no-more-shit attitude, striking that match for the cigarette (one of many smokes I'm sure he's lit in the service of a thankless job), popping in the diner, enveloped in that trenchcoat, looking for a psychically controlled, weak-minded human a nasty cult leader named Whistler uses for all sorts of evil activity, and I was a fan for life.

And that is just the first fifteen minutes! Fighting off a counterwoman in a diner in the 23rd century who looks like a diseased zombie once Whister's hold on her alters her into a fiend, Jack Deth (fuck, yeah, that name might be cheesy to you, but when I was a kid, I thought it was the coolest name ever) has to "singe" her or else. Hunting Trancers controlled by Whistler is what Deth only does, especially since his wife was killed by one.

Jack Deth in '84 LA during Christmas fighting Zombie Santa, motorcycling with the cutest punk-haired Helen Hunt (who a fresh-looking 21 year old), hitting skid row for a broken down drunken bum who is the ancestor of a politician responsible for the future being even less a drag than it would be, equipped with a "time slowdown" watch and a vial to send him back to the future once he finds the ancestor of Whistler (a cop with a great rank in the department),within lots of neon-drenched, punk and biker Chinatown...it was just a 76 minute adventure I was all about. Band really hit this one out of the park. I can't tell you how many times I watched this as a youth. I even remember seeing a VHS box of it as "Future Cop" in an appliance store that also rented out VhS tapes in the early 90s.

Oh, and I can listen to that mindworm score on rotation while on the treadmill, reliving my first feelings of the film. I hum it for days after. This is the case where it is just too short...I'm just bummed when the credits start because its over. One of the riches (and sadly a downside) of having talented character actors is producers like Band can often get them on the cheap. They need to eat. So this film has an embarrassment of riches in that regard. All the casting is filled with gems like Manard, LaFleur, and Hopkins. Thomerson and Hunt in the leads...they are why I adore this even more