Trancers II: The Return Of Jack Deth

The summer that was dominated by the megabuck sequel to THE TERMINATOR also saw the considerably quieter, direct-to-video release of TRANCERS II, the follow-up to Charles Band's TRANCERS, itself a knock-off of THE TERMINATOR.

The original TRANCERS, alias FUTURE COP, was no masterpiece, but it did have a spark of energy and inventiveness that has eluded most Band productions ever since. Central to both the original and the sequel is the notion of time-travel via the "genetic bridge": one can drink a serum and wind up in the body of a distant ancestor. In the first film, a 23rd-century criminal called Whistler (Michael Stefani) had thus escaped to 1985 Los Angele...