We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
SCANNER COP II: THE SHOWDOWN (1995)
One year after the release of Scanner Cop, Daniel Quinn became the first person to star in two Scanners movies when he was brought back to star in Scanner Cop II: The Showdown (also known as Scanners: The Showdown). This time Quinn's character Sam Staziak has made detective and is working under the great Robert Forster as Captain Jack Bitters... and there's an evil scanner stalking the streets of Los Angeles, killing other scanners and absorbing their abilities - something new to the franchise. The villain is Karl Volkin, played by the prolific and memorably named Patrick Kilpatrick, and he's giving himself a power boost so he can stand up to Staziak. He has a vendetta against Staziak because the scanner cop had previously sent the criminal scanner and his brother to jail, and the brother didn't survive behind bars.
It doesn't take long for Staziak to figure out that Volkin is the one responsible for the dead scanners turning up around the city, but he needs to do some investigating to catch up with the guy. Along the way he gets some assistance from Khrystyne Haje of Cyborg 3 as Carrie Goodart, a fellow scanner who's also trying to help him find his long-lost mother. (We know already know what happened to Staziak's dad; he didn't make it past the opening sequence of the first Scanner Cop.) Can you guess who finds mom first?
Scanner Cop is my favorite movie in the Scanners franchise, and while Scanner Cop II is a step down from that one I would still rather watch it than Scanners, Scanners II, or Scanners III. It's a fast-moving, low budget action flick with a whole lot of scanner attack sequences in it that are brought to the screen with some grotesque special effects. Volkin's power-sucking scanning leaves his victims a mess, and we're made to watch while their bodies break down.
The bad guy isn't the only one putting their telekinetic abilities to use; Staziak has also managed to master his own power, a fact which has made him something of a badass on the police force. There's a sequence where he takes care of a hostage situation with his abilities, and one of the criminals on the receiving end of some painful scanning is played by veteran stuntman Kane Hodder, best known for playing Jason Voorhees and Victor Crowley in the Friday the 13th and Hatchet franchises.
Scanner Cop II was directed by Steve Barnett from a screenplay by Mark Sevi, who has left a comment here on Life Between Frames in the past. I have always been fascinated by a period at the start of Sevi's screenwriting career when he wrote eight low budget sequels back-to-back. This was the sixth in the run, following Dead On: Relentless II, Class of 1999 II: The Substitute, Fast Getaway II, Ghoulies IV, and Relentless IV: Ashes to Ashes. The other two, well, I'll probably get to them eventually as well.
Since I had a Scanner Cop poster on the wall in my childhood bedroom, I also scored a copy of the Scanner Cop II poster from a local video store, for the sake of completion. This one's poster never ended up being put on the wall, though. Just never got to it.
BEAST (2017)
There's a serial killer stalking the Channel Island of Jersey, murdering teenage girls on an average of one a year for the last four years. A local who gets caught up in the mystery is Moll (Jessie Buckley), a tour guide with a miserable home life, as her overbearing mother Hilary (Geraldine James) expects her to give up her own wants and needs for the benefit of everyone else around her. So when Moll meets a man who Hilary and her polite society friends would strongly disapprove of, filthy rabbit poacher Pascal (Johnny Flynn), she very quickly and enthusiastically dives into a relationship with him. Problem is, Pascal is a prime suspect in the murders of those girls, and Moll's police officer acquaintance Clifford (Trystan Gravelle), who has an unrequited crush on her, has his eye on her new boyfriend.
I've been hearing about Buckley quite a bit lately, she seems to be a star on the rise, and now that I've actually seen her act in something it's easy to see why. She carries Beast on her shoulders and turns in a captivating performance as a troubled character who makes some questionable decisions. Writer/director Michael Pearce crafted an interesting story with Beast, but the film wouldn't be nearly as watchable as it is if it didn't have Buckley playing Moll.
The actors around her also do fine work, and Pearce makes sure we don't know until the very end exactly what's happening on Jersey and who's committing the murders. Beast is the sort of odd, slow burn movie that you almost expect to have an unsatisfying ending, it wouldn't have been surprising if Pearce chose not to give viewers the answers to its mysteries, but thankfully we do get answers in the end. So Beast is worth checking out if you want to see a strange movie with a great lead actress.
OPEN 24 HOURS (2018)
It was a nightmarish situation when Mary (Vanessa Grasse) discovered that her boyfriend James (Cole Vigue) was the serial killer known as the Rain Ripper, so called because he liked to kill his victims on rainy nights because he felt it cleansed their dirty souls. But things got even worse for Mary after that, when James would force her to watch him kill. To escape this hell, Mary set their house on fire while James was inside. He was burned, but didn't die, and ended up going to prison. So did Mary, for a while. And that's the back story for this movie, that all happened before we even meet Mary at the beginning.
When we catch up with Mary, she has just been released from prison, she's suffering from paranoid delusions... and she needs a job. She gets hired to work the night shift at a 24 hour gas station in the opening scene, and from there Mary lives out the saying "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean somebody's not out to get you."
Mary's first shift at the gas station takes her through a long, rainy night, and not only does she have to suffer from the delusions she keeps having, but it does seem like someone is watching her, waiting to strike. Who could it be? James is supposed to be behind bars. Mary receives odd phone calls at the gas station, and you never know when some shady character might come through there. Mary can't believe her eyes because some of the horrific things she sees aren't really there, but the viewer has to assume we can believe our eyes when we see a raincoated, hammer-wielding character start attacking people Mary is associated with.
Open 24 Hours is a little long at 103 minutes, some viewers might not like spending that much time at the gas station with Mary, but writer/director Padraig Reynolds keeps things interesting most of the time, and packed in a good amount of twists and turns. There's quite a lot going on in the movie, and some of twists were not expected by me.
Grasse, who was previously in Leatherface, does a good job in the lead role, and she has a solid supporting cast around her that includes genre regular Brendan Fletcher as fellow gas station employee Bobby, Emily Tennant as Mary's friend Debbie, and Daniel O'Meara as her parole officer Tom Doogan.
If you're a horror fan, Open 24 Hours is worth checking out.
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