Sam Staziak, a rookie cop with the Los Angeles Police Department, is also a ‘scanner’ (psionic). When a string of murders begins to decimate the police department, Sam faces sensory overload and possible insanity as he uses his powers to hunt the man responsible for the killings.

So now we come to Scanner Cop which might as well be called Scanners 4 but really is more like Scanners 2.  It’s a better Scanners 2 – it’s what Scanners 2 should have been.  While it’s nowhere near on equal footing as the original movie, as far as follow-ups to it go, Scanner Cop is really not that bad.

This is the one that Josh Hadley speaks highly of in any public forum.  So much so that of all the “Faggot Josh” memes out there this is the only one that is surprisingly accurate.

So what is it about Scanner Cop that makes it such a damn good and easily memorable movie?

Scanner Cop basically forgets that Scanners II or Scanners III ever happened.  it acknowledges that the events of Scanners happened, lightly giving us the backstory of what a scanner is. We no longer have these ever-evolving treatment drugs for scanners like F2 and F3; we only have the original Ephemoral and, goddammit, it does it’s job good.  One could think of  Scanner Cop as a rebooted sequel – like what Superman Returns tried to with its own franchise – forget the bad sequels and only acknowledge the good ones.  While Superman Returns was a boring piece of cash-in crap, Scanner Cop does a great job of being a new, improved and much more entertaining Scanners 2.

The film starts just a few years after the events of Scanners as we see a scanner living with his son, Samuel, in a shit-hole apartment.  There’s no more ephemoral in the house and as this is the drug that keeps scanners from completely losing their shit it’s quite a problem for this broken family.  Little Sam is cool, he had some Ephemoral that morning but Dad hasn’t had any for 4 days and he’s gone insane.  He’s screaming at the voices in his head and hallucinating all kinds of disturbing things.  When the police show up he has no concept of reality and keep on being crazy to the point of getting himself shot, leaving his son an orphan.

Poor orphan Sam… forgotten by society, and apparently forgotten by the internet because Google image search doesn’t know who you are.  I had to get a screencap of the kid myself.

Young Sam is adopted by Pete, the officer that saved him from psycho-dad.  As long as he takes ephemerol every day there’s no reason this scanner kid can’t have a normal life.  14 years later Sam is grown up and follows in the footsteps of his new father by becoming a police officer.  Now Sam Staziak is Officer Staziak or Scanner Cop.  Sam has grown into a fine young man.  Sure he’s got the emotional depth and capability of cardboard but, damn if he ain’t good looking.  He immediately sets to work using his scanner abilities to set right the world through the field of law enforcement.

However there is someone out there in Los Angeles that HATES the police.  This mysterious person hates them so much he’s brainwashed people to murder whomever they see wearing a uniform.  A kindly Asian man at a diner suddenly goes nuts and kills two cops.  A man at a newspaper stand hacks up a cop with a machete.  It would seem that Scanner Cop Sam chose the wrong day to join the LAPD.  However with random people losing their minds and attacking cops – this is just the kind of job that needs a scanner’s special abilities.

The late Richard Lynch plays the vengeful Karl Glock who is behind this rash of brainwashings.  Like Michael Ironside in the first *Scanners, Richard Lynch is a go-to character actor that always plays the bad guy quite well.  For most of his career that’s the roles that Richard Lynch played – villains.  In horror and sci-fi movies and tv series all through the 80s and 90s and even up until his recent death.  His final role was in Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem as Reverend Hawthorne.  There’s a reason that Richard Lynch always played villains – he was goddamned GOOD at it.  His performance as Karl Glock in *Scanner Cop is no different and he gives the franchise the life it needed.  Lord knows that Daniel Quinn wasn’t going to do that with his work in the title role.  Next to Richard Lynch piledriving his way through every scene as the most awesome villain, Daniel Quinn might as well just be a cardboard cutout of a Scanner Cop.

So why is Karl Glock brainwashing innocent civilians to murder police officers?  It’s just a standard revenge plot – nothing too noble about it.  He’s not trying to expose a greater evil of police corruption or anything like that.  Glock was arrested once and he carries a pretty bad grudge over it so – PSYCHO VENGEANCE!  The LAPD depicted in Scanner Cop are all upstanding gentleman (literally, “gentleman,” as I don’t think I saw a single woman on the force) and all the villains are broadly painted archetypes of evil.  As far as characters go, Scanner Cop is very simplistic.  No need to thing about the various gray shades of human nature; just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Yes, but not so much with Scanner Cop.  There is only one head explosion in the whole movie – and it mostly happens offscreen.  Scanner Cop, however, gives us a whole new type of body horror.

Right off the bat we get something new and interesting with Crazy-Dad’s hallucinations.  He’s hearing 8 million voices in his head which he sees as actual things in his head.  Instead of having his head explode, faces grow out of his forehead – FUCKING FACES!!!  They look like little unborn fetuses trying to crawl out of his skull and it is goddamn creepy.

As the only scanner in the whole movie is Sam the Scanner Cop – we don’t get too many deaths by scanning.  Most onscreen murder happens at the hands of Glock’s brainwashed individuals who use a knife or a gun – nothing too spectacular.  Then there is the final battle between Sam and Glock where we learn a new thing about the limitations of a scanners’ abilities – they can’t go through a metal plate in someone’s head (remember… we ARE knocking Scanners II and III out of continuity, so whatever bullshit that happened there didn’t actually happen).  So when Sam tries to scan the hell out of Glock, all he does is melt the skin around that metal plate.  It’s gruesome looking but there’s no exploding head.  Not until Sam realizes he can do basically whatever he wants to Glock when he has physical contact with him – so by grabbing Glock’s arm and using all the scanner power he can muster THEN we get our one ‘splodin head…. kind of.  It happens off screen but we do get to witness that metal plate fly off, crash against the wall and then act as a handy bowl to catch the falling brain matter.  It’s still a pretty good “fuck yeah” kind of moment.

Scanner Cop was a revitalizing experience.  When I was feeling down and saying “Aw crap, I still have two movies left – why did they make so many of these fucking movies,” along comes a great, fun flick like Scanner Cop to brighten my spirits.  Now I’ve only got one movie left and not matter how good or bad Scanner Cop 2 is it’s the only one I have left to worry about.

Quite early in his career, Tobe Hooper became a formidable director with the success of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974. There are some folks who dislike this film for whatever reason, but it has been championed by enough critics, professional and casual alike, to gain cultural significance. A print of the adrenaline gushing Massacre has even made its way into the holdings of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hooper’s follow up, Eaten Alive of 1976, never garnered nearly enough recognition. In fact, a good majority of viewers including horror genre fans find the film awful. I suggest that perhaps they are viewing the film with the wrong expectations. Eaten Alive is a bizarre Grand Guignol yarn that subverts any kind of narrative tradition. It rejects any claim to reality and pleasures itself in a load of swampy southern muck.

Eaten Alive opens with a young Robert Englund (who went on to become Freddy Krueger) saying, “my name’s Buck, and I’m rearin’ to fuck,” a line that was later echoed by a character in Tarantino’s Kill Bill. The film cuts from Buck’s belt buckle to a sparse room in a whorehouse, brightly and boringly lit as if it were a porn set. The woman (Roberta Collins) he is with resists his advances and gets thrown out after he attempts to rape her. This nameless, blond-wigged woman seems like she will become the protagonist of the film, but after getting to the Starlight Hotel, she is quickly fondled, mortally injured with a pitchfork and fed to an alligator at the hands of Judd (Neville Brand), who turns out to be our leading man. Hooper manages to pack two sexual assault scenes into the first ten minutes of Eaten Alive, indicating its miserable, hopeless tone. While Norman Bates at least seems like a nice young man when Marion Crane arrives at the Bates Motel in Psycho, Judd over at The Starlight is immediately recognizable as some kind of unstable creep.

Next, a married couple arrives with their young daughter. The audience is once again given the opportunity to identify with some potentially “normal” characters, but we soon find out that the husband, Roy (William Finley, who got his start in DePalma’s early films) is completely unhinged. At one point he even begins nonsensically barking like a dog. While his daughter is recovering from the shock of the family dog being eaten by the gator, Roy decides to take matters into his own hands. This ultimately leads to the gator dragging him away to his death. Judd then proceeds to terrorize Faye, the wife left behind, played by Marilyn Burns who gets to reprise some of her screaming talent from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (it makes you wonder what motivations she had to do the new role after the insanity she had to go through in the earlier film). Another couple arrives, and the cycle continues. In between all of the violent scenes we watch Judd mill about his hotel taking part in random activities—quietly crooning, looking at magazines, dusting furniture, turning lamps on and off… none of this seems necessary, yet Hooper is obviously not playing with an average plot progression.  

The thing that needs to be stressed more about Eaten Alive is its absolute digression from reality. It looks as if sunlight never reaches the Starlight Hotel, only a hellish, saturated red glow. Plumes of fog hang around the building and the swamp, creating a setting worthy of a theater production—sometimes they pump so many thick clouds into the frame it looks like something is on fire. Whereas The Texas Chain Saw Massacre succeeds in its semblance to reality, Eaten Alive takes viewers in an unexpected direction, truly reminiscent of Grand Guignol theater. It focuses primarily on one setting that is quickly stained with spurts of blood, high-pitched screams echoing in the swamp, and old Judd at the center, mumbling all the while. All of this is punctuated by the bare bones, twisted electronic soundtrack composed—and perhaps improvised—by Hooper himself and Wayne Bell.

Much like the family members in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Judd appears to be impotent, or if any of them do act on their sexual appetites, they are based on some necrophilial perversity and not nubile young women. Another way of looking at the scenario is by likening the hotel owner’s pet gator to an extension of, or rather replacement for, his penis. Like many horror movie antagonists, he kills with a phallic object, doesn’t fuck with it. Judd actually has many similar qualities to the old man in the previous film—later given the name Drayton Sawyer in the sequel—with many of the same mannerisms. Eaten Alive leaves the responsibility of lechery to young Buck, the entitled, smart-ass rapist who’s death is probably the most satisfying kill in the film. The women in Hooper’s early films seem to be there in order to be terrorized. Men are violent and pathetic, and women have to survive the chore of co-existing with them. Faye is tied to a bed with electrical tape around her mouth for about half the film. When Lynette (Janus Blythe) the sexy, underage girl who Buck brings back to the Starlight escapes from Judd, one gets the sinking feeling that the random guy who picks her up is probably not going to be the chivalrous type. This is the bleak, nightmarish world of Tobe Hooper: relentless, unfair, Southern Gothic gone crazy.

In short, Eaten Alive is a maligned masterpiece that needs everyone’s reconsideration. Those audience members responsible for a 30% approval rating on the rotten tomatoes film review aggregator website need to watch the film keeping in mind that its structure is subversive in itself, not some badly thought out disaster. While not as good as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Eaten Alive is still worthy of being a film in need of preservation and kept in MOMA’s holdings. It is a good thing that the folks over at Arrow Video understand the significance within the mayhem that is Eaten Alive, as they released a restored, high definition version of it within the past couple of years. Next, we need to have a theater established that can be a Grand Guignol revival, as Eaten Alive would make an excellent, blood soaked stage production.  

Stop motion is a dying art form, so any time I can see a great old example of it I get pretty excited. I certainly wasn’t expecting to see it in Dolls, which, let’s be honest, from the premise sounds a little silly. Sure large collections of dolls can be a bit creepy, with their tiny hands and flat eyes and fixed-on expressions of happiness or sadness or anger. But except for clown dolls (nothing is more frightening than a clown), they don’t usually evoke fear in most people. That is exactly what this movie wants – to make you afraid of them. And for the most part, it actually manages to succeed. Because the dolls here don’t just look creepy, they giggle and move and get up and chop you to pieces with tiny – but very sharp – knives. If you don’t want to be nice and play well with others, they will teach you a valuable lesson. One you will remember for the last few moments of your life, at least.

This film was actually a lot better than I expected. I was prepared for all kinds of campy wackiness, like that seen in Puppet Master and Ghoulies. Instead what I got was a gory fairy tale about the importance of remaining a child at heart and loving and respecting the people around you – or else. Dolls is made on film, which I’ve always thought lends well to horror movies. It gives them a heavy, slightly scratchy look that adds to the intensity of their purpose. You just can’t get scared when things are all bubblegum pink and bright. It takes place somewhere in the country wilds of England (I think) which lends a bit of gentility to the haunted house-style setting. And with a kindly old English couple serving as host and hostess of creepy doll Hell, it really is a live action Grimm’s story waiting to happen.

The special effects with the dolls adds quite a bit to the believability and overall creepiness of the story. They are not done with CG, and even composite shots are kept to a bare minimum. The majority of scenes are done with precise and well shot stop motion. The dolls move slowly, jerkily, like you expect real dolls would …. if they suddenly came to life and started attacking people. Many of their action sequences don’t even take place on camera. They move when you aren’t looking, giggle menacingly from the dark corners of a room, and drag victims off into the shadows to do the real dirty work. It is an effective way to make something that could look ridiculous on camera seem, well, not so ridiculous.

It helps Dolls that it was directed by a horror professional, Stuart Gordon, who before this made Re-Animator and From Beyond, and later when on to make The Pit and the Pendulum, Dagon, two episodes of Masters of Horror and an episode of Fear Itself. You have to have a feeling and understanding of horror to make a good scary movie, and it helps to have a director who has worked in the genre and shown that he is capable of getting the point across (if there was a point in Re-Animator of course). Dolls was written by Ed Naha, who might not have a long horror resume to back him up, but did write the feature Troll. Another film with a fairytale feel to it that mixed a bit of scary with a bit of fantasy.

It is, unfortunately, in the dialogue where we see the major flaws in this film. The little girl (Carrie Lorraine), while managing to get all of her lines out in each scene, is obviously spewing forth things repeated to her over and over again so she’ll remember them. And I could actually see her taking direction from someone off camera a time or two. Dakota Fanning she was not. Her stepmother is textbook evil, her father is stereotypically neglectful, and the British punk girls who show up are the definition of Madonna-wannabes spouting too much slang and not enough real punk vitriol.

That isn’t to say the acting was bad, per se. Ian Patrick Williams of Re-Animator and TerrorVision (as the sorry excuse for a father) has the experience to get things done, and classy Guy Rolfe (who would later star in four of the Puppetmaster sequels) manages to be comforting and yet mildly threatening at the same time. They just don’t have the greatest material to work with and so make do with a film that is top-notch in effects but pretty average in dialogue.