- Directed by David Cronenberg
- Written by David Cronenberg
- Stars Jennifer O’Neil, Stephen Lack, Patrick McGoohan, Michael Ironside
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 43 Minutes
- Trailer: Scanners (1981) US trailer
Non-spoiler Judgment Zone
It’s a conspiracy-centered story about mind-controlling telepathic assassins and the mad scientist who created them. If that doesn’t blow your mind, then the rest of the film will! We both liked it a lot.
Synopsis
A homeless-looking guy walks through the mall, stealing food from other peoples’ used trays. Two judgmental old women start giggling about them, but then he makes one of them have a seizure. A couple of guys in trench coats who aren’t police, shoot the homeless man with a tranquilizer. He passes out, and they drag him away.
He eventually wakes up, cleaned and strapped down to a bed. Dr. Paul Ruth walks over and asks the man, who’s name is Vale, why he doesn’t use his power more constructively. Ruth explains that Vale is a “Scanner,” a topic that Dr. Ruth studies carefully. He brings in dozens of spectators, and the number of people make him go crazy; he can hear their thoughts. Ruth gives Vale an injection, which calms the voices in his head.
A man who claims to be a Scanner is doing a presentation in front of an audience. He asks for a volunteer to come up and concentrate. The man looks like he’s in pain, and the volunteer looks angry. They seem to be having a mental battle, and the volunteer starts to smile as the first man’s head explodes violently.
Turns out, the volunteer was a stronger scanner named Darryl Revok, who is taken into custody by gunpoint. Revok makes the doctor sedate himself. He then makes all the security guys die, mostly at their own hands.
Braedon Keller is named the new head of internal security for ConSec after that fiasco, and he wants to drop the scanner program. There are 236 known scanners, and none of them are working for ConSec. Dr. Ruth thinks there’s a “Scanner underground” that is hiding all of them. Ruth wants Revok eliminated, and he wants to train an unknown scanner to infiltrate the underground. Ruth has one unaffiliated Scanner— Vale.
Scanners have a certain form of ESP and telepathy. Ruth says he doesn’t know why. Ephemerol is a Scanner suppressing drug that temporarily prevents the voices in Vale’s head and disables his powers. Ruth shows Vale a twelve-year-old film of Revok in a psychiatric ward after trying to drill a hole in his head. Today, Revok has been killing all the scanners who refuse to join him.
We see that Mr. Keller is reporting to Revok; he’s a mole. He tells Revok the plan to get Vale to go undercover and infiltrate Revok’s group.
In the meantime, Ruth has arranged Vale to undergo testing by a Yoga Master. Vale just about kills the guy; he’s got pretty good control over his abilities.
Vale goes to see Benjamin Pierce, a Scanner who has been more or less reformed with “art therapy” and knows how to contact Revok. People break in to the house and shoot the place up, including Pierce. Pierce sends Vale a message with his dying thoughts.
Pierce told Vale to go to see Kim Oberist, which he does. She’s with a group of Scanners in a kind of support group. They are all linked together mentally when the assassins break in. They shoot several of them, but a few get away. Soon, only Vale and Kim are left.
Vale tracks Revok to a pharmaceutical company that makes Ephemerol. It looks like the drug is all going to ConSec. Revok orders Keller to kill Ruth if he finds out too much. Vale tells Ruth everything, and they decide there must be a traitor at ConSec.
Keller interrogates Kim, and it goes badly. He knows that Kim isn’t really in Revok’s group. She gets away but Keller orders that both Scanners be killed. Ruth, in the meantime, starts talking to himself as Keller sneaks up behind him and shoots him in the head.
Outside, at a phone booth, Vale connects to the computer over the phone using his mind to retrieve the list of people who are receiving Ephemerol. He Scans the computer. Keller orders the computer techs to self-destruct the system. The system cuts off with Vale still inside it. The computers and telephones all explode, killing Keller.
They go to see a doctor who is on the list, and Kim encounters a pregnant woman in the waiting room. The baby scans Kim, which is weird. The doctors are all giving Ephemerol to their pregnant patients, creating an army of new scanners. They are both tranquilized by Revok and taken back to ConSec.
Revok says that he’s been looking for Vale for years. Revok explains that Ruth was his and Vale’s actual father. They are brothers. Ephemerol was created in the 1940s, but the drug had the side effect of creating Scanners. The two of them are not only older, but more powerful than any of the others.
The two of them fight, Scanner-style. Their veins bulge and bleed, their eyeballs turn white, and Vale bursts into flame until Revok… fade to black.
Kim wakes up in the next room. She goes inside to find Vale’s body burnt to a crisp and finds Revok’s body now containing Vale’s mind. He says, “We’ve won.”
Commentary
The exploding head was a great practical effect, and it still holds up. The plot is a pretty straightforward conspiracy story, with no real shockers until the very end.
Michael Ironside has always excelled at playing psychotics who are having more fun in their evil plan than they have any right to. Stephen Lack, as Vale, is generic and fairly boring. He’s a cardboard hero who doesn’t show much emotion at all. Jennifer O’Neal gets top billing here but she only gets a handful of lines and is only onscreen for a couple of minutes.
I hadn’t seen this one in decades either, and all I remembered was the head exploding in the very first scene. I’m sure if they remade this one, heads would be popping all over the place, but it actually only happens once in the film. That’s an effective scene!