Trancers III finds Tim Thomerson still playing Jack Deth, Helen Hunt playing his current wife, and Megan Ward playing his first wife. Jack's a private eye in 1992 Los Angeles and Helen wants a divorce. One day Jack doesn't come home for 13 years and Helen remarries.
It's a fucked up life for the time traveling trancer hunter. Jack's been called back to 2247 and when he gets there he finds things are pretty dire. Megan Ward fills him in the situation. The trancers have been attacking Angel City and it's not looking too good for the city. They send Jack to 2005 LA to kill the guy who's been making all the trancers.
Andrew Robinson plays an ex-military guy who's building his own trancer army. Melanie Smith plays RJ, one of the people who's being turned into a trancer. She escapes and hooks up with Jack to fight Andrew.
There's a fair bit of action and other stuff going on. C Courtney Joyner wrote a fair script and then directed it. The Wikipedia says the budget was $2 million which seems like a lot for a Full Moon picture. By comparison the Charles Band picture Evil Bong 777 from 2018 has a budget of $25,592. I haven't seen it but if it's like any of the other Evil Bong movies, it's crap. What happened to Charles? Who cares.
Trancers 4 came out in 1994 and a transporter malfunction it takes Jack Deth to another dimension where trancers are vampire like creatures. There's magic too. Jack joins the underground to fight the evil Lord Caliban. It's mostly medieval stuff going on in that universe. The movie was filmed back to back with Trancers 5 and they filmed on location in Romania so they could use an old castle.
This time the script is by Peter David and the director is David Nutter. It was the first script work for Peter, he'd write a couple of pretty good episodes of Babylon 5 soon after. David mostly directs TV, he's worked on The X-Files, Millennium, Roswell, Band Of Brothers, Smallville, The West Wing, ER, The Sopranos and many others.
The story was goofier than than the previous Trancers films but not by much. It was still entertaining enough for me to get to the end. Full Moon lucked out hiring Peter David and the quality of his work put him onto bigger and better things. The IMDb Trivia page for the movie says that Tim Thomerson is embarrassed by his involvement with Trancers 4 and Trancers 5. Maybe that's why he's not in the last Trancers film, other than for some archival footage from a previous film. I'll be seeing that next week.
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