Scanners II: The New Order (1991)

SCANNERS II: THE NEW ORDER (1991)

Dir: Christian Duguay.

This is the first film of the Christian Duguay’s duology of The New Order and The Takeover. With a decade since the release of David Cronenberg’s Scanners, I’m sure the sequel’s creators have thought long and hard how to honor the original film. Or they just created a watered-down version of the conspiracies of the first film and made the story about Scanners being used by the police to clean up crime and fix elections.

To the film’s credit, they at least discuss some of the original film. It turns out that our main character David Kellum and his sister Julie Vale are the offspring of Cameron Vale and Kim Obrist. They are the children of scanners. So one can assume that once Cameron took over the body of his brother Darryl Revok, they had these two children. But we have no real idea because the sequel only spends a few seconds giving the audience what they actually want.

Instead, The New Order focuses on David learning of his scanning abilities, thwarting a robbery by exploding a guy’s head and being forced into law enforcement. If the story would have stopped there, this would be an alright sequel. But no, the police chief wants to use his scanner force to rig local elections before seeking true power. It’s up to David to stop him from one boring scene to the next. Hopefully the third film is better.