DVD Review: Scanners 2 - The New Order

Due to the success of David Cronenberg’s 1981 sci-fi horror flick ‘Scanners’ on the video market people were calling out for a sequel to be made. ‘Scanners 2 – The New Order’ was made and David was nowhere in sight. He turned down the project and has not made a comment at all about any of the sequels to his movie. So helming duties went to fellow Canadian and cinematographer Christian Duguay. This was Duguay’s debut and is basically a rehash of the first movie’s storyline only taking the exploitation action movie route. Yes this was shot for the video market, but it did receive a theatrical release too, and a short lived I must add. This is a far cry from the intelligent savvy of Cronenberg’s shocker.

What we have is a corrupt cop, Commander John Forrester (Yvan Ponton), dabbling in politics to run the city using a naive young scanner to get his ill begotten gains. Gone are the social commentaries, and although there are a few gooey moments, they are not a patch on the exploitions of the first. Actually when compared to the first movie this seems like an unwanted bastard child, and on that note with the spectacular but open and ambiguous ending of the first we find that they eventually got it together and had a kid (although time travel seems to be the only option here with the ages and time frames on show). This kid, David (David Hewlett), did not know who he was and why he was different. Now this is like someone telling us what happened to MacReady and Childs after the ending of John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ (okay they did do this in a comic book) or the next episode in the lives of Rick and Ilsa from ‘Casablanca’ (which was written about in the book ‘As Time Goes By’), but these have never made it to moviedom as we don’t actually want to be shown what happened ! Our minds have our own joyful conclusions and questions and shame on you to fuck with that ! Unknown to David is the fact that he is not the only scanner on the Commander’s books. Peter Drak (ineptly played by Raoul Trujillo) is another; this misfit is more of a psychotic and becomes the Commander’s deadly right hand for all of those really unsavoury tasks. So throw in some bad action sequences, some bad acting, and some sub plots about more experimentation on scanners by other mad scientists and you basically know the rest. You know the good guy will find out about the bad guy and bring the house down.

I am amazed that any other sequel arose from the ashes of this one, as it does everything it could possibly do to could to kill any chance of a franchise being made. But perhaps they hoped they would get another hit on their hands and ‘Scanners 3 – The Takeover’ was made almost back to back (perhaps word of mouth had not gotten around quick enough). Then a spin off movie, ‘Scanner Cop’, was made by the original producer, Pierre David, which also spawned a sequel. Here we have a good transfer and sound options of Stereo 2.0 channel, Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS. ‘Inside Scan’ continues with Alan Jones being all too familiar that this is not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination. Some trailers for the trilogy and a few text notes and biogs end the extra quotient. 'Scanners 2 - The New Order' is available via AmazonUK and as of yet has no US release date, and is also available as part of a trilogy boxed set.

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