TRANCERS II: THE RETURN OF JACK DETH is a DTV sequel that came out in 1991, six years after the original TRANCERS, and four years after the at-that-time-unreleased anthology short TRANCERS: CITY OF LOST ANGELS. The cop from the future was now starting to be a relic of the past, like he’d always dreamed.

A new screenwriter, Jackson Barr (BODY CHEMISTRY, SUBSPECIES, ROBOT WARS, MANDROID) joins director Charles Band (PARASITE), but otherwise everybody is back. Tim Thomerson (between an episode of The Flash and an episode of Baywatch) is Jack Deth, the time traveling future cop now well established as an old-timey private eye in 1991 Los Angeles. Despite the subtitle he’s not returning from anywhere, he’s just sticking around in the same place. (And he beat BATMAN RETURNS to it by a year.) He’s married to Lena (Helen Hunt, a year before starting Mad About You) and they live in a mansion with Hap Ashby (Biff Manard, DESERT KICKBOXER), the former MLB player they saved from homelessness. In the intervening years Hap “made a pile of money” on “commodities speculation” and now collects firetrucks (?!).

The biggest tension in Jack and Lena’s relationship is that Lena wants them to buy their own house to settle down and have a kid in. Gone are her punk rock days. She wears bland ‘90s jeans and has regular-colored hair. She looks like Helen Hunt, actually.

How are we gonna get some trancers (sleeper agents who can be turned into mind-controlled zombies) into this TRANCERS sequel? Well, there’s this cult-like environmental activist group (?) called Green World, run by E.D. Wardo (Richard Lynch in his followup to ALLIGATOR II: THE MUTATION). To the amateur he appears to be a completely ordinary, very obviously evil cult leader guy being creepy on TV. But in fact he is the brother of part 1 villain Whistler, who travelled back from the future to grow herbs and create trancers out of the mental patients and homeless people he recruits for Green World. He also wants to take over the Angel City Council in the future, so he sends trancers disguised as landscapers to kill Hap, the ancestor of one future member.

Also for some reason the people in the future want Jack to come back and join the council, but Raines (Telma Hopkins, THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS) explains that he can’t return to his original body because it’s “calcifying,” and she sends his boss McNulty (Art LaFleur, DEATH WARRANT) back with a “tap back device” that he will use to transport a new machine called a TCL Chamber which Jack can use to travel forward in time in his current body. Still no word on whether we should feel bad for Jack’s ancestor whose body he took over, and now we have the new issue of pretending to worry about Jack not being able to return to the future even though in part 1 he decided he didn’t want to.

Once again Mcnulty inhabits the body of his now-teenage ancestor (Alyson Croft, MAID TO ORDER), so there’s more jokes about a young lady smoking cigars and talking like a middle aged male cop. They sent another agent before him, Alice Stillwell (Megan Ward, ENCINO MAN, PCU), but they haven’t heard back from her because she got locked up in the mental hospital run by Nurse Trotter (Martine Beswick, THUNDERBALL, NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW) and Dr. Pyle (Jeffrey Combs, I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER) as a farm team for Green World. Also, important note: Alice is Jack’s wife. She had already been killed in a trancer fight when he came back in part 1, but they sent a technician to the day before that and then sent her back to the ‘90s without telling her she’s gonna die right away if she comes back.

As you can see, there is nothing convoluted or confusing about this plot. Absolutely elegant and streamlined. A perfect narrative machine.

When Jack finds out Alice is still alive there’s some real Guinness Book of World Records worthy unreasonable behavior. It would be a difficult dilemma for anyone to figure out (ask Dominique Toretto) but he just decides he can temporarily get back together with his original wife and not really explain the situation to either of them and act confused when Lena gets upset about it.

Here’s Lena finding out about Alice:

and here’s her walking in on them again later:

Alice keeps mentioning “making love” and Jack immediately starts making out with her no matter where he is. If Jack is any indication then these future men, or at least future cops, are absolutely terrible in relationships. Just catastrophic.

I mentioned in the review of TRANCERS that there’s a notable age gap between Jack and Lena. It’s bigger now, because Ward is about the same age that Hunt was in the first movie, but the gimmick is that that’s just the body she’s in. Lena calls her “that teenager” and tells him “You’re a bigamist!” I guess it’s supposed to be a fantasy that due to a time travel related loophole it’s not really wrong for him to make out with a 21 year old babe and also be responsible, settle down and prove he still loves his 28 year old wife.

When Jack is ready to go into action there’s a close up of gel squirting into his hand and then he slicks his hair back with it, doesn’t even brush or comb. In CITY OF LOST ANGELS he defeated a serial killer with pomade, so I guess hair products are his trademark. He’s still pretty good at trancer hunting. He keeps getting attacked and “singe-ing” them, but most of the time we don’t see their bodies disintegrate, so it’s very possible he’s wanted for a series of murders, including of cops. But even if they were all trancers, do they really have to die? Is there definitely no curing a trancer? It seems like it would have to pass eventually, wouldn’t it? This is never considered.

Hap really has no faith in Jack saving him. He decides that he’s doomed and chooses to relapse into cartoonish alcoholism, which includes wearing his Angels uniform while carrying two bottles of liquor and playing drunk baseball with the homeless community.

There are a few things to enjoy here that were not also in the first one. For example I was excited to see Sonny Carl Davis, star of THE WHOLE SHOOTIN’ MATCH and LAST NIGHT AT THE ALAMO, as a nutty orderly at the hospital who I think is also a a patient. I guess now I know how he ended up in all the EVIL BONG movies. Evil trancers were the gateway.

This is the kind of movie where Jack and his friends are cornered and he says sincerely, “Save a bullet for yourselves,” but also where a long dialogue scene can end with the line “Hey Jack, what’s with this ham? It’s stuffed like a turkey” and then Jack leaping into action to toss a ham through the window before it explodes. Also, the climax involves a small fire, so Hap shows up in a firetruck to put it out, I guess paying off the weird detail at the beginning that he collects firetrucks. Then Jack just throws a pitchfork and it sticks right into Wardo. Probly shoulda tried something like that earlier.

TRANCERS II is an okay-enough sequel, and kinda fun in its clunkiness. But it doesn’t add anything particularly exciting to the proceedings, Lena is not as fun when she’s an aspiring suburban housewife instead of an open-minded punk, I’m not sure what its grudge is against environmental activism, and at least at the current viewing date of 2026 its 1991 trappings are very unappealing compared to the first movie’s ‘80s stuff. In both movies they live in an idealized hang out with a bar, but the fluorescent-art decorated upstairs loft was much cooler to look at than the mansion and its basement Cheers:

A few other notes: Barbara Crampton has a cameo as a talk show host interviewing Wardo. There’s a part where Jack has Band’s previous film CRASH AND BURN on TV (but turns it off right at the title). Also I want to point out that Lena has really good handwriting.

It’s interesting that TRANCERS came the year after THE TERMINATOR, seemingly somewhat inspired by it, and this one came out about two months after TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY. In my controversial opinion James Cameron’s version of a time travel action part two is, like, way better (as is his part one), but it’s cool to see the different types of arcs a low budget genre series like this can take. Usually something like this is the best you can hope for.

Is TRANCERS II: THE RETURN OF JACK DETH particularly good? No. Will I return like Jack Deth to watch the next one? I’m afraid so.