I remember throwing in the towel on the Scanners series after being particularly underwhelmed by Scanners 2: The New Order, and subsequently kept my distance when Scanners 3: The Takeover, Scanner Cop and Scanner Cop 2 (aka Scanners: The Showdown) all appeared on the video rental shelves. Maybe I was a little premature on calling time on the series though, as finally catching up with it nearly thirty years later, Scanners 3: The Takeover unexpectedly turned out to be lots of fun.
Colin Fox (star of the legendary Canadian horror soap opera 'Strange Paradise') essentially has the Patrick McGoohan role in this one, playing the scientist father to a pair of scanner siblings. The son, Alex grows up to go all Rambo 3, attempting to find himself by living among Buddhist monks. Daughter, Helena on the other hand becomes the Guinea Pig in her father's experiments which transform her from the meek and mousy type to a megalomaniac vixen who uses her scanner powers to climb the corporate ladder.
After two sombre sequels, Scanners 3 really beats you about the head with the silly stick, as naughty Helena uses her scanner powers to make a chauvinistic colleague perform a striptease at a well-to-do restaurant, forces a talk show host and his star guest to make horny fools of themselves on live TV, while a pigeon learns the hard way that it is not wise to poop on a scanner. Helena also has male scanner followers, who once mobilised, start dressing like prohibition era gangsters, and an oversexed nurse scanner who seems to think she is acting in a parody of a porn film.
Considering how tonally different this all is to the first Scanners film, there is a surprising amount of callbacks to early Cronenberg movies here. The flirty behavior on the live talk show recalls the James Woods/Debbie Harry antics of Videodrome, dead bodies end up in a garbage truck à la Rabid, and on the basis of this and Rabid (original and remake), Canadians must really have it in for men dressed as Father Christmas.
As Helena, polish actress Liliana Komorowska drops into the film with all the subtlety of a megaton bomb, playing a mixture of Joan Collins and Donald Trump, while sporting an accent so thick that it feels like she was on a one woman war against the English language. The long-of-name Komorowska easily overshadows the bland 1990s pretty boy playing her sibling/adversary, as the series ventures into the era of male ponytails, corporate villains, erotic thrillers and yes even kick-boxer movies.
