I'll tell you why so serious

Great Film overall

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Incredibly Bad. "Is it a local call?" What the hell was this? Bad acting. Bad story. Bad cinematography. It was still a little better than Scanners 2. They had a budget and they blew it. Next time, think about it before filming.Incredibly Bad. "Is it a local call?" What the hell was this? Bad acting. Bad story. Bad cinematography. It was still a little better than Scanners 2. They had a budget and they blew it. Next time, think about it before filming.Incredibly Bad. "Is it a local call?" What the hell was this? Bad acting. Bad story. Bad cinematography. It was still a little better than Scanners 2. They had a budget and they blew it. Next time, think about it before filming.

Scanners 3 could just be the most unrelentingly ludicrous film in movie history, no exaggeration. I'm actually surprised it doesn't seem to have built up a retro cult fanbase the way movies like Troll 2, The Room or Samurai Cop have. I think it could easily reach those giddy heights of 'so-bad-it's-ridiculous' acclaim if enough of the right audience saw it. It veers like a drunk on steroids from one totally demented set piece to another, never pausing long enough to ask itself wtf is going on. The acting is gloriously OTT, especially from the female lead who comes across like the ultimate pantomime baddie, cackling sneering and roaring her way through the film with a luminous green flashing circle stuck behind her ear (don't ask).It seems pointless describing much more. If you're a fan of the bizarre, the absurd, the bad, the twisted, the preposterous, the uncanny and the warped, then enter this way and bring a crash helmet. It's years since I saw Cronenburg's original and I can't even remember if I saw the first sequel, but Scanners 3 must surely stand alone as probably the most bonkers piece of cinema, of the 1990s at least, but possibly ever?

A young female scanner turns from a sweet young thing into a murderous, power-crazed villain after she takes an experimental drug developed by her father. Her brother, who is also a scanner, is the only one powerful enough to stop her.We start out with the standard good and evil plot, brother against sister... but, in all fairness, this is a plot structure that works. From there, it actually gets much more creative, introducing the use of Eastern meditation to control the scanning and the use of TV to more widely broadcast scanning.Some memorable moments are here, too, including the mind-control dance scene, the Taiwanese boxing and plenty of firefights and explosions, including an arm that flies off.As with "Scanners II", this definitely could have been a series, even more than the last film. The ideas developed here really set up a broader picture of good scanners against bad ones, and how such powers could be used not just on a combat level, but to actually infiltrate and dominate society. There is much potential.

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.