Posts Tagged ‘Helen Hunt’
Monday, May 11th, 2026
May 10, 1996
They’re scientists, but they’re cowboys. And they follow the wind. When they get the call they strut and they smile at each other knowingly as they hop into their Jeeps and trucks, slam on the gas and hurtle toward the danger, thinking nothing of it except ha ha, what a fun time we’re having here. They playfully exchange lingo-filled banter over the CB as they look up to the sky or down to the dots on their computer screens. They each have their own quirks and their own styles of musical accompaniment and their own ways of yelling “WAHOO!” in the face of God’s mighty wrath.
They are the wildpeople of weather, the maniacs of meteorology, the tornado terrorists, the thunder jockeys, the Doppler demons, the Hell’s Angels of nerds. They are the storm chasers, and they absolutely will not stop, ever, until they deploy their new device designed to release hundreds of small floating sensors into a tornado to measure it from the inside and obtain data that could potentially help improve early storm warning systems in the future.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Ruck, Alexa Vega, Anne-Marie Martin, Bill Paxton, Cary Elwes, disaster movies, Helen Hunt, Jami Gertz, Jeff Nathanson, Jeremy Davies, Joey Slotnick, Joss Whedon, Lois Smith, Michael Crichton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Scott Thomson, Sean Whalen, Steven Zaillian, Todd Field, Wendle Josepher
Posted in Reviews, Action | 24 Comments »
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2026
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. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alyson Croft, Art LaFleur, Barbara Crampton, Biff Manard, Charles Band, Full Moon Entertainment, Helen Hunt, Jackson Barr, Jeffrey Combs, Martine Beswick, Megan Ward, Richard Lynch, Sonny Carl Davis, Telma Hopkins, Tim Thomerson, time travel
Posted in Reviews, Action, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 4 Comments »
Monday, January 5th, 2026
You may remember that I recently saw TRANCERS for the first time. Which of course means I haven’t seen any of the other TRANCERSes. And I’m a sucker for a long series of sequels. I’m not planning to watch them all in one chunk, but I don’t want to let them sit and fester, I thought I should get started. So I learned about the unusual fact that it took them seven years to get around to part two, but three years before that they filmed a TRANCERS short meant to be a segment in an anthology film called PULSE POUNDERS. The movie was never released, a casualty of Empire International Pictures going out of business.
I didn’t mention this before but after the black and white version of JOHNNY MNEMONIC came out, Charles Band released TRANCERS in black and white calling it TRANCERS NOIR. So he’s not one to miss out on a quickie library exploitation. When a copy of the PULSE POUNDERS segment turned up in 2013 he released it as a standalone on DVD even though it’s only about twenty minutes long and of rough transfer quality. These days you can get it as an extra on the TRANCERS blu-ray or just watch it on Tubi. The lost angels were found. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Art LaFleur, Charles Band, Danny Bilson, Grace Zabriskie, Helen Hunt, John Carl Buechler, Paul De Meo, Telma Hopkins, Tim Thomerson, time travel, Velvet Rhodes
Posted in Reviews, Action, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 22nd, 2025
Would you believe I never saw a TRANCERS movie before now? And I’ve still only seen one. But when Dreadguacamole recently mentioned in a comment that it “goes pretty full-in on its christmas cheer” I decided that would be a good one to watch right now. Thanks for the tip. It’s a good balance – not a movie about Christmas that would feel weird to watch in some other time of year, but enough decorations here and there to make it kind of cool to watch when it’s seasonal.
I was aware that TRANCERS (1984) was directed by Charles Band (PARASITE), and that it reunited him with METALSTORM: THE DESTRUCTION OF JARED-SYN’s Tim Thomerson (UNCOMMON VALOR), now playing a character called “Jack Deth.” And that’s really all I knew. I’m filling in some blindspots here. Trying to become more cultured.
Turns out it’s a time travel movie and a zombie movie and a couple other things. It starts in 23rd century Angel City (FKA Los Angeles) and it immediately reminded me of some weird ‘80s comic book, because it has that era’s fascination with futuristic worlds where men try to seem like they’re out of some old detective novel. Not like BLADE RUNNER – it knows it’s cheaper, pulpier, not all gloomy and shit. But you got trenchcoats, a mix of futuristic and retro cars, a neon-ed out ‘50s style diner called Mom’s No. 3., and Jack’s big ears and enormous shoulder pads make him look more caricature than man (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anne Seymour, Biff Manard, Charles Band, Christmas, Danny Bilson, Empire Pictures, Helen Hunt, Paul DeMeo, punk, time travel, zombies
Posted in Reviews, Action, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 21 Comments »
