Trancers

 Before there was a Full Moon Pictures, and way before he started making dumb shit for people who are too stoned to know any better (AKA: the Sharknado set), Charles Band put out his B-movies through Empire pictures. He had a pretty good run: Ghoulies, Dungeonmaster, Zone Troopers, Terrorvision... not to mention Robot Jox, Re-animator, Rawhead Rex and From Beyond. That's an impressive, eclectic list that includes some genuinely great films - and the streak extends into the early days of Full Moon, too: Castle Freak, Subspecies, and good old Dr. Mordrid.

 Band makes his entrance into this blog with 1984's Trancers, one of Band's few non-horror efforts. I'm not going to pretend it's aged all that well, but... yeah, it's still a lot of fun.

 Sometime in the 23rd century, a gruff, ornery cop in the Sam Spade mold going by the name of Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) is hunting for trancers - regular people who have been brainwashed by his nemesis Martin Whistler as sleeper agents programmed to... attack Jack on sight, I guess.

 This is communicated via some clunky, Blade-runner-style voiceover (a device that quickly disappears, never to return). It plays over Jack arriving and heading into a dingy diner with a set design that also seems to owe a lot to that Blade Runner - I mean, look at this:

 Within, he abuses his authority (some things will not change in the intervening centuries, it seems), but he's proven justified when the nice old lady behind the counter turns into a zombie-like maniac. A really fun fight ensues - any movie that has a cute old grannie getting punched in the face in its first scene can't be that bad.

 Later he gets into a fight with his boss, who wears a suit a '50s used car salesman would think twice about wearing, and ends up quitting the force because he's too much of a lone wolf and a loose cannon to, you know, fulfill the basic obligations of his job like taking on assignments. "He was a good cop", the boss muses, "until a trancer killed his wife"; Some clichés, like police brutality, will never die.

 His retirement doesn't last long. Jack is summoned by the... (checks notes) High Council Western Territories (they have a floormat with that title in front of their big iron door). It looks like Jack's old nemesis Whistler survived and fled to the past, and is using his trancer-creating ability to kill the councilmembers' forefathers to erase them from existence in the present.
 The way time travel works here is, aside from a remarkably half-arsed take on paradoxes and time alteration, that when you travel back you take over the body of one of your ancestors. And obviously, that's what Jack is asked to do to stop Whistler.

 So Jack's gotta get back, back to the past and take over the body of a distant journalist relative in 1985. One who, luckily, owes a trenchcoat. From there he starts investigating whistler, who's taken over a hot-shot police detective (Michael Stefani). Only... investigating seems to be a bit too strong a word for what Jack does, which is basically to bumble around and get attacked by a number of trancers.
 The most memorable attack is by a mall santa (the movie is based around Christmas night), another great fight scene that scores a few laughs (Mrs Santa, calling for security over comms: "There's trouble at the North Pole"). Jack enlists the girl his ancestor was banging, Leena (a very young Helen Hunt) as an initially unwilling sidekick he slowly wins over, has some fish out of water escapades, and of course a pretty cringeworthy budding romance (Hunt's twenty, and looks a lot younger; Thomerson is in his mid-forties, and fully looks it).
 

 The film is kind of a hot mess, but it goes down easy thanks to a good balance between being a Terminator knock-off and keeping a sense of humour about it. The leads are likeable, there are some good fights, and despite its second half not being nearly as much fun as the first, it never overstays its welcome.

 Band has never been a good director, but he handles himself fine here, and even manages some atmosphere for that first scene. The effects are few and not that ambitious, but a lot of fun, and the script (by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo) scores a few laughs.

 The better Empire/Full Moon flicks are B-movies that know full well that they're B-movies, and this was made while Band still cared about quality. So if you don't mind a low budget, some corniness and a whole lot of cheese, it won't disappoint. It was followed, in true Full Moon fashion, by a buttload of sequels, a couple of which I remember enjoying. Someday, maybe... I still need to revisit the whole scanners saga so I can get to Scanner Cop 2.

 And it's a surprisingly Christmas-y movie, if you care about that sort of thing; Oversized candy canes and nutcrackers are used in the mall fight as weapons. Later there's a (very poorly dubbed) punk cover of Jingle Bells, and a trio of homeless people play at being the three wise kings. And.. well, not a lot else that I remember, but it's still more than Die Hard.