Deth Eternal Part One

With the latest installment of the popular TRANCERS series just released on video, CINESCAPE takes a look back at the adventures of Jack Deth

By John Thonen     August 02, 2002

TRANCERS 6, the latest entry in producer Charles Band's long running film series, just hit video stores. Which makes it a perfect time to take a look back at the chronicles of time traveling, tough guy cop Jack Deth. Joining us for this look, courtesy of recent and older interviews with this author, will be many of the people who helped make this wildly uneven but often highly enjoyable film series.

In the early '80s, producer/director Charles Band was back on his cinematic feet after his over-schedule and way over-budget 1980 disaster, THE DAY TIME ENDED. His new production company, Empire, had stunned the film industry when the low budget 3-D feature METALSTORM: THE DESTRUCTION OF JARED SYN (1983) out-grossed Universal's heavily promoted big budget feature JAWS 3-D. Empire had attracted a lot of talented young creative types, all of whom saw Band as a latter day Roger Corman and hoped they would become latter day Francis Ford Coppolas by working hard and cheap at Empire.

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For better or worse, Band himself has often been the source of the core ideas which became the nearly 200 films he has made over the past twenty years. One of those ideas was that of a time-traveling cop. Among those wandering the hallways at Empire was a young screenwriting duo, Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, who would prove to have a unique gift for mixing Empire's stock and trade, low budget sci-fi films, with elements of other film genres. "Danny and I were serious film buffs," DeMeo explained in 1995, "and we really loved noir films and those tough-guy detectives, you know, Bogart and those kind of guys."

As was the general rule at Empire, everybody kind of took a shot at Band's various concepts until somebody came up with a script that stuck. Eventually, the time traveling cop idea worked its way around to Bilson and DeMeo. The writing team had been around the production of METALSTORM and had made the acquaintance of co-star and former stand-up comic Tim Thomerson. Thomerson sported a gravely voice, prematurely graying hair, a craggy, weathered face and a penchant for a kind of winking self-deprecation, which made him hard to dislike on screen or off. "Everybody had really liked Tim," agreed DeMeo, "and he's a big movie fanatic like Paul and so we talked together a lot during the shoot. We found out that we both loved those hard-boiled detective movies. It was pretty obvious that Tim could play that kind of part and that he really wanted to, so we pitched Charlie on the idea and he loved it." While Thomerson himself still describes Bilson and DeMeo as "those two kids," he was as caught up in the idea of putting a '40s detective in the future as the writers were: "We all loved those noir movies of the '40s. So that's who the character became. Danny and Paul wrote a Bogart-like detective who's a time traveling cop, and I got to be him." Jack Deth.

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Hot off the success of METALSTORM, Band was able to assemble a strong cast for TRANCERS, but a key role was that of a present-day young woman who gets caught up helping Deth and eventually falls in love with him. The character had to be attractive but also convey intelligence, resourcefulness and strength, not that common a set of attributes for actresses in the '80s, who were generally just poofy-haired cuties. Band explained in 1995 that "My real hope in those days was that by casting younger, or lesser known, performers, that some day I would have a library of titles that featured the early work of some people who became major names." While he didn't have the luck that Corman did in this area, Band's early work does feature people like effects artist Stan Winston, director Andrew (THE FUGITIVE) Davis and Demi Moore. "I can't claim that I discovered these people," the producer said, "but our working together when we did gave some impetus to both our careers." One of those people Band provided career impetus for was a young but quite experienced woman by the name of Helen Hunt.

"She'd been acting since she was like six or seven I've been told," Band recalled, "and I think everybody had seen her in one TV show or another when she came to the TRANCERS audition, but she certainly wasn't famous." Perhaps not to the general public, but one person who did know the then twenty-one year old actress was the film's star. "I'd worked with Hunt before on a TV show I did," Thomerson recently recalled. "I think she was about 16 at the time, and I was pretty impressed with her. Thought she was the real deal, you know? She just knew what she was doing and she cared about it. So, when she came in to read for TRANCERS, I saw her and I told Charlie, 'This is her. You can just stop this now, 'cause this is her.'"

Indeed it was, and the film quickly went into production, a day well remembered by co-writer DeMeo. "From the day we gave Charlie the TRANCERS script to the day it opened in theaters, I don't think it was even five months. Now, Danny and I have moved on, but it took five years for us to get our script for THE ROCKETEER (1991) into production. That's the joy of working with Charlie. If he likes it, he does it. None of this development hell nonsense."

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TRANCERS (sometimes referred to as FUTURE COP) was a modest theatrical success in 1985, but it's still, critically, the best received of all of Band's productions. But the writing was on the wall for theatrically releasing B movies, however clever and imaginative. Band had the foresight to sell it to Vestron Video, where it was a big hit in the booming new home video market. Similar success would also meet Empire's RE-ANIMATOR, a Stuart Gordon film based on the works of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Band - who was now producing films in Italy, at a much lower cost than in the U.S. - decided to cash in on the popularity of these two films, along with an earlier effort of his called DUNGEONMASTER. The result was an anthology film entitled PULSEPOUNDERS which was comprised of three separate short films, one a sequel to TRANCERS, featuring both Thomerson and Hunt, a DUNGEONMASTER sequel, and a new Lovecraft adaptation, "The Evil Clergyman," which featured the three lead actors from RE-ANIMATOR.

Meanwhile, Band's Empire had jumped on the home video bandwagon in a big way, pumping out several dozen films, pre-selling them based solely on titles and poster art. Unable to meet the demand, Band began financing independent filmmakers to turn out some of the films he had already pre-sold. The result was films like ROBOT HOLOCAUST, GALACTIC GIGILO and VISCIOUS LIPS, films so bad that Empire's budding reputation was instantly trashed. The eventual result was Empire's financial collapse, leaving several of its final productions, including PULSEPOUNDERS, in a legal limbo from which it has yet to emerge. After a short stint in the glow of critical and fan adoration, it looked like Trancer hunter Jack Deth was himself dead.

But Charles Band has always been resilient. Scarcely a year after Empire ended up in bankruptcy, he was back with a new production entity, Full Moon Pictures, whose product was intended strictly for home video release. "There's times when Charlie is down, but nobody can keep him there," said frequent Band collaborator and low budget film specialist David DeCoteau recently. "Nobody ever made a better deal than the one he did with Paramount. They financed all his Full Moon movies and he had complete creative freedom. Nobody but a Spielberg or a Kubrick gets that kind of deal with a major studio, but Charlie got it."

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While the rights to most of the final Empire productions were long ensnared in legal difficulties, one of the few titles he had retained the rights to was TRANCERS. Within a few years after the start of Full Moon, Thomerson was back with Hunt for 1991's TRANCERS 2: THE RETURN OF JACK DETH. "I wasn't surprised when Charlie decided to do number 2," explained Thomerson. "You have to remember that Hunt and I had already done another one in Italy, which nobody had ever seen. It's tied up in some legal mess, like most things Charlie does. But we knew he wanted to continue the character."

Fans welcomed the return of Jack Deth but in spite of the return of Hunt and most of the first film's key cast members, most were disappointed by the results. You can count the film's star among those who felt that way. "Number 2 was just so silly," said Thomerson. "And it didn't really have a story either. It's just all of us running around being goofy. It was a lot of fun to make but I don't know that it's as much fun to watch." The second film in the series has the feeling of a reunion of a lot of people who really like each other even Band's and Hunt's parents have cameos in the film but apparently Band himself realized the end result left a lot to be desired. So he turned to another young writer whom he hoped would give the TRANCERS series what Bilson and DeMeo had given the first film: a sense of direction.

"Tim had been in a film I'd written called VIETNAM, TEXAS a few years earlier," recalled writer/director C. Courtney Joyner. "And when Charlie asked me to write PUPPETMASTER 3 it was at the same time as they were doing TRANCERS 2. I went to the set and reconnected with Tim, had lunch, talked over old times and we kept in touch after that. I'd just written CLASS OF 1999 and a CBS TV movie and I told Charlie that if he wanted me to stick around as a writer then I wanted a chance to direct and he told me the next movie I wrote for them I could direct. Well, that turned out to be DOCTOR MORDRID, which Charlie co-directed with his dad, but I got the next one and that was TRANCERS 3."

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Joyner gave the series a whole new purpose and a bit of a Bond-type action adventure feel by setting Deth up as a time traveling troubleshooter with a violent alien partner named Shark and a super-villain opponent played by Andrew Robinson, probably still best known as the psychotic villain in DIRTY HARRY. Joyner recalled, "When I saw DIRTY HARRY, I was like 12 years old and I was so completely rocked by that movie. If anybody had told me when I walked out of that movie theater that Scorpio [Robinson's character] himself would be in the first movie I directed, I'd have fainted on the spot. Andy is one of the great people of the world and I was so thrilled he agreed to do the movie."

The thrills didn't end there, the fledgling director recalled, "One of the things Charlie told me was that I had to have something for Helen to do because he thought he could get her to come in and I was flabbergasted. She was already well known, her show was well on its way to being a hit. She was pretty big stuff." Joyner might have known Thomerson and Robinson already, but budding superstar Hunt was an unknown commodity for him. "I was very nervous about working with her and I didn't even meet her until the day she shot. You're talking about someone with enormous experience and [who's] very serious about what she does. I didn't know quite how to work with her because I was so nervous. But she got on the set and she was working with Tim and they have this great chemistry and she laughed. And you know, when it was done, I got a kiss from her. No big passionate lip lock or anything, but how many guys can say that?"

Be sure to check back soon for part two of our look back at the history of the TRANCERS film series.

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