Opening with a Christmas party in which a scanner shows off his powers with unexpectedly tragic results, this second sequel to David Cronenberg's 'Scanners' begins on a chilling note. Things only get more interesting as one of the party guests soon has to use her scanning abilities to fend off muggers, which results in massive headaches (having avoided scanning in so long) with a possible cure in an experimental nicotine patch style of sorts. After this promising start though, the plot soon derails as the patch as the side effect of turning her into a homicidal megalomaniac, similar to Raoul Max Trujillo in 'Scanners II'. Lead actress Liliana Komorowska manages to chew the scenery even more so than Trujillo though in such a wildly exaggerated performance that it is draining to watch. There are also a host of ill-defined supporting characters who inexplicably wear sunglasses all the time (to stop accidentally scanning??) and as she manages to control others through television sets, her powers end up more fantastical than pseudo-scientific as in the first two films. 'Scanners 3' does, however, deserve some points for presenting a more original plot than Part 2. There is also quite a bit of humour in the mix (forcing an obnoxious date to dance; waking up in a morgue) and the special effects are uniformly excellent, but this is a hard film to get excited about.

This movie is misunderstood. It caters to a very specific audience that enjoys seeing power abused to create injustice. Much like other movies of this type, much of the movie focuses on the main villain. The villain uses their disproportionately powerful abilities for pleasure and profit. People who look too deep into the plot will be disappointed for they didn't grasp that the movie is a pornography for power, affluence, and domination. If you enjoy seeing people struggle from the overpowering supernatural abilities of an immoral female protagonist disguised as an antagonist, then this movie is definitely for you. There are very few like it, and in that sense, this movie is a gem. Other movies that resemble to this on are Supergirl, Stardust, I Dream of Genie, Zap 3, and Matilda. All of which had a poor score because most didn't understand what the target audience was.

In the third installment the main villain is a woman scanner, who started out a normal person until she stopped taking her medication, Ephemerol-3. Eph-3 is a drug in the form of a patch that is placed behind the ear to relieve Scanners of the migraines they get when they are out in public (it must give them a headache to hear everyone's thoughts at once.) She eventually goes megalomaniacally insane and wants to take revenge on the doctors that experimented on her as a child, and ultimately rule the world with the rest of the Scanners. First she sets out to free the scanners currently being tested at Dr. Baumner's office then proceeds to kill him resulting in one of the most graphic deaths in the Scanners history. She blows up his finger then scans him until his eyeballs boil and his brain hemorrhages (you've got to see it) then finally his head explodes (of course.) There's all sorts of gory deaths. There's a syringe through the tongue, a man who dives head first into an empty pool, a drowning, an inflating (again, has to be seen) and exploding head, and a man who gets spun around in a revolving door so forcefully his face is deformed. But then it explodes anyway. This one actually probably has the highest exploding head count. The whole time her brother, the hero is trying to track her down and help her, but she evades him and eventually he is captured by her gang of scanner thugs and is pitted against her in a one-on-one battle on live TV. I don't recall him killing her, she just sort of goes back to "normal". Kind of a dull ending, but its made up for by the abundance of action and special effects. I enjoyed this one better than the second, which I thought was better than the first.

Let me start out by saying that this is a wonderful film. When I rented this movie initially I thought that it was going to be one of those low budget action films with awful special effects, terrible dialogue, terrible plot and gratuitous nudity (like the highlander movies). I was dead wrong. Scanners III is a wonderfully cerebral film, chock full of allusions and references to American folklore, popular science fiction novels of the past century (i.e. 1984 and just about everything by Michael Chricton), Huey Lewis and The News song lyrics (I've got a brand new drug) and the religion and philosophy of the Algonquin Indians. What an analytical treat!!As the iconography in this film suggests, American culture is dominated by the media, the pharmecutical companies, and cheap dares we do to impress girls on Saturday nights. We are soulless zombies, only acting on impulses that have been passed down to us by our parents. If we only used our heads (as Alex Monet does in this film (monet is an obvious reference to the french impressionistic artist...there are many more delicious reference-goodies in this gem!)), we could overcome the social and mental chains that are hindering us from developing as a society. The film is beckoning us to cast away homburg hats and black suits of the nineteen forties for more casual clothing, eschew hot concentual sex with busty mental-hospital nurses for passionate lovemaking with loved ones, to send christianity and all of western society to the junkyard and take up Tibetan Buddhism, the only religion that has the capability to give one enough strength to overcome one's weaknesses. In no way is this film just another sequel to David Cronenberg's far inferior film Scanners. This is a treatise on how to live life successfully. I urge you to watch it immediately.