Customer Reviews

Scanners II: The New Order [VHS]

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Decent sequel with David Hewlitt. Hewlitt was a decent actor already. He appeared on TV shows like Forever Knight. Of course he is probably most recognized from Stargate Atlantis. Here is the main star. Scanners II The New Order is a rehash of the original with slight differences in characters and story. It is, however, regardless of similarities and differences an enjoyable Sci-Fi movie.

David plays David Kellum a nurse who doesn't know he is a scanner. He is a bit similar to Cameron's Vale character. Both of them realize they are special but have trouble dealing with their scanning abilities. Just like Vale, Kellum gets recruited by a corporation and a doctor who wants to take advantage of his scanning technique.

Whereas in the original, you had this powerful scanner Darryl Revok played excellently by Michael Ironside, here you have Raoul Trujillo. You have a dirty corporate named Commander Forrester doing the same thing Keller did in the same movie: using the Scanners for his own purposes all the while putting on a completely different image for the public..there's also a twist about what happened to the characters of the first movie but it isn't very convincing.

That's about where the comparisons with the original end. The movie ends very differently than the first movie. There are couple of added scanning techniques that we didn't see in the movie like the ability of scanners to see somebody through their own eyes.

Scanners II has decent if not great acting, another follow able story, decent special effects and all around it is a decent sequel to the original.

The dynamic duo from the first film apparently got together and had children. Those children have grown up to become super scanners in this unnecessary followup.

This time, the evil corporation has been replaced by an evil civil servant moonlighting at an evil corporation. A young man meets with him, solves a lovely subplot crime involving poisoned children's milk, finds out his new boss is not nice, and turns against him. The evil civil servant wants to start a "new order," where there would be no crime because the scanners would run everything. The evil corporation does have a bunch of scanners in their basement, hopelessly addicted to a new version of what turned them into scanners in the first place.

This film has the adult children of the original's scanner couple, although the films were only ten years apart. David Cronenberg had nothing to do with the series of sequels his film spawned. Deborah Raffin, second billed, does not show up until an hour and ten minutes into this, her character is explained in such a way that it must have been written in on set.

We are treated to more violence, more gore, more good scanners, and more bad scanners. Obviously, the good scanners win in the end, and yet this was followed by a few more sequels. This is just a retread of the first film, which was no classic to begin with, and I felt the same way here as I did with the original: no recommendation.

This is rated (R) for strong physical violence, strong gun violence, strong gore, and some profanity.