Yes! Made it through

[Jay O'Connor]

I finally saw the last "Trancers" movie, at least the last one made so far.

Might I say, the last few were *very* bad.  Any connection to the first movie was gone completely.  

1 & 2 - Trancers are under mind control
3 - Trancers are drugged up soldiers
4 & 5 - Trancers are life force vampires in a medieval other dimension.

Not only that, but the acting got very bad.  Deth's character got sillier and sillier, almost a charachiture of itself.  The stories made *no* sense.  (Yes, shooting  a diamond...er...Tiamond...with your phaser will instantly return you to your own dimension and time, 30 seconds after you left)

but...I've endured and lived to tell the tale.

Tonight!!!  I finish off "Subspecies 4: Bloodstorm" - Radu, the Energizer Bunny of Vampires

[Jay O'Connor]

The Subspecies series has maintained a much higher level of quality *and* consistancy than the Trancers series.

[Mofo Rising]

I know how you feel.  I recently forced myself to watch every single AMITYVILLE movie.  They are all fairly terrible.  Well, one or two of them are alright, but they are more than outweighed by the others, at least one of which deserves the skull.

I was going to write a whole post about it, but it would be far too long (eight movies) and nobody would care but me.  I guess it will have to wait until I have a webpage of my own.

[Jay O'Connor]

I think what really bothered me about the later episodes, and why they were so bad, was that the definition and characteristics of a 'trancer' changed, but Deth's character did not.  This ended up making Deth look like an idiot.

In the first two movies, trancers were weak-minded people who were being mind controlled and set to kill people.  Regardless of the individual merits as people pre-trancing, they were effectivly killer zombies.  Deth's reaction to them, self-defense and elimination, made sense.  

However, in 4 and 5, Tracers were more like vampires, and were born as trancers with no control over their condition.  However Deth is still reacting to them as if the were movie 1 and 2 trancers.   Now Deth comes across as a racist, ant-trancer biggot

This is very bad writing.  To change the rules of the environment of the characters without changing the motives and reactions of the characters is dishonest to the characters.

[Mofo Rising]

Jay O'Connor wrote:
>
>  
> This is very bad writing.  To change the rules of the
> environment of the characters without changing the motives
> and reactions of the characters is dishonest to the
> characters.

Yes, that would be bad.  But I haven't seen the TRANCERS series, so I'll go back to AMITYVILLE to show how bad sequels can get.

AMITYVILLE I, II, and 3-D all take place in the original house.  They even have a roughly coherent story.  The first is about a family who moves into a haunted house where several murders took place.  The second is the prequel, about those murders, and 3-D is about a team of psychic investigators who move into the house later.  The first is boring, the second is the most reprehensible of the series but got interesting at the end, and the third is cheesy good fun with obvious 3-D effects that aren't in 3-D.  The third is my favorite of the series, and My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult sampled its dialogue for several of their songs.

THE EVIL ESCAPES, the fourth one, is about a lady who buys a lamp from the house and sends it to her sister.  The "evil" in the house escaped in the lamp and takes over the new house.  That's right, we're supposed to be afraid of the lamp.

THE AMITVILLE CURSE has nothing whatsoever to do with the first movie.  It's about a completely different house that just happens to be in the same town.  You know it's bad when from the moment the characters show up you wish they were all dead.  By the time Mrs. Moriarty showed up I was ready to kill myself.  SKULL!  Run away!

1992: IT'S ABOUT TIME, the evil shows up in a haunted clock that this family buys.  Slowly takes over this new house where everybody goes crazy except for this one kid.  Has some neat ideas about the elasticity of time, but goes nowhere really.  One of the better ones.

A NEW GENERATION, the evil shows up this time in a mirror.  (Seeing a pattern?  Never buy anything that previously resided in a haunted house.)  This photographer guy is given the mirror by a hobo.  The hobo is actually the kid who killed his family in the second movie, and the photographer is his son.  He must fight his dark side, which tells him to kill everybody.  Takes place in New York City.  Wasn't bad, wasn't good.

DOLLHOUSE, the evil shows up in a dollhouse that looks exactly like the original Amityville house.  Where this dollhouse came from I have no idea.  The family finds it in the shed to their new house.  Umm, what happens to the dollhouse happens to their house.  Doesn't make a lot of sense, but it is sort of entertaining.  The mom in this movie is smoking hot.

And that's all of them, except for the AMITYVILLE 2000 documentary.  As you can see, most of them have nothing to do with the original movie, and my vote for "Least Likely Franchise" goes to this series.  I have a lot more to say about these movies, especially the pain I subjected myself to by searching for, finding, and watching these movies.  This is long enough already.

Hope I'm not hijacking your thread to much, Jay.

[Nathan]

Yes, it's bad writing -- but Peter David really isn't to blame.  Charles Band did to him what he did to eveybody around that time period:  "I have a castle in Romania.  Write the movie(s) around it."

Nathan

[Jay O'Connor]

"I have a castle in Romania. Write the movie(s) around it."

Yeah, I thought I recognized that castle :)  I almost expected Radu to be the evil head trancer :)

Incidentally, the third movie had the same problem.  Here the trancers were drugged up soldiers.  So you have the same problem of Deth saying that only weak-minded 'squids' became trancers, against the girl saying she became a trancer to become the best soldier she could.  Not quite as heavy handed as 4&5, but the same issue.

Although 4&5 did raise an interesting concept: "What if James Bond's gadets didn't work?".

They probably could've had a story similar to the first two.  "evil guy goes back in time to create a trancer army to ruin the future"  Except the bad guy picked a long enough time frame and location to try to avoid Deth going down the line to a predecessor.  Except Deth has the TCL chamber so he can go to any time or location, which foils the badguy's plan.

Oh well...