With Scanner Cop, we have one of the five greatest films about psychic powers due to an enlarged hypothalamus. Essentially an unnumbered Scanners IV, its title character is wimpy Sam Staziak (Daniel Quinn, Spiders II: Breeding Ground), a second-generation scanner who becomes a cop after 15 years living under the adoptive, scannerless wing of an LAPD commander (Richard Grove, Army of Darkness). In order to keep his scannerbilities under control, Sam must take meds daily; otherwise, he could suffer wild and ultimately fatal hallucinations like baby-doll faces bursting through his forehead.

However, the rookie Sam is asked to forgo his pills to help Dad crack a string of murders, in which cops are killed by random citizens brainwashed to mistakenly see all officers as tarot-card corpses, giant insects and assorted pants-sharting whatnot. The madman behind this plot? Why, whomever perennial villain Richard Lynch (Invasion U.S.A.) is playing, of course! And this time, as Glock, he’s got a metal plate in his head — all to make his eventual defeat-by-a-scannin’-Sam scene about 10% more daunting, yet 100% more awesome.

For those who’ve never seen David Cronenberg’s original Scanners — or even just the instantly famous clip that launched a million playground conversations in 1981 — a scanner basically scrunches his face and looks at an enemy really, really hard until the foe seizes up and shakes uncontrollably to the point of an exploding noggin. With a violent mess of blood, bone and brain tissue, this is the money shot of the Scanners franchise; no sequel is complete without one, although Scanner Cop sure bides its time before getting around to a one-two punch.

With the series producer Pierre David taking the directorial reins here, he expands Cronenberg’s concept to more of a general telekinesis from the case file of Carrie White. Thus, Sam’s mind upskills to include piloting defibrillator pads to fly across the room, getting a stranger to hand over his car keys and, best of all, convincing a cafeteria patron to let Darlanne Fluegel (1988’s Freeway) call dibs on a slice of pie.

No powers are needed for you to enjoy Scanner Cop, about as unfussy and consistent as your Cinemax weekend premieres were in that glorious final stretch of time when that B-friendly movie channel meant something — right before the internet ruined everything. A near-end sequence in hell is a bit much, but at least it gives the movie an opportunity to turn the melon of Hilary Shepard (Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie) inside out and then some. —Rod Lott

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I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: Terry Gilliam has always been a true visionary who has never received the full credit he truly deserves, and I’m not talking about Monty Python.

While he has done some truly great movies like Time Bandits, Brazil and The Fisher King, I feel that he reached his absolute mainstream height with 1995’s 12 Monkeys, a truly original take on time travel inspired by the absorbing French short film La Jetée, told mostly in photographs.

Bruce Willis stars as James Cole, a prisoner chosen for a dangerous experiment to travel from 2035 to 1996 to stop a deadly disease that was supposedly started by a group known as the 12 Monkeys. However, during his first attempt, he ends up in 1990 in a mental institution, with Jeffery Goines (Brad Pitt) as a bunkmate, giving him — who happens to be the leader of the 12 Monkeys, natch — the idea for starting the simian insurrection.

Mistake (somewhat) fixed, Cole is sent to 1996, for real, kidnapping one of his former doctors from the asylum, Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe). He attempts to stop the 12 Monkeys — and the virus in general — but through a series of continually turning and twisting spheres, we soon learn that Cole can’t change the future, no matter how hard he tries. But he doesn’t know that.

Filmed with Gilliam’s masterful hand, 12 Monkeys presents a claustrophobic underground future, yet somehow makes the then-present feel even grimmer and grimier. That’s one of his specialties, with everything he’s ever done coming together, almost knowing that the end of the world — and the end of his career due to money-hungry studio heads — was coming. —Louis Fowler

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Released many years before the absolutely terrible song by Swedish metal-lite band Europe, The Final Countdown is mostly famous for being one of the few science-fiction movies that jaded old men — particularly World War II vets — who typically only watch Westerns seemed to somewhat enjoy, as my father did whenever this came on television.

Still steel-jawed in 1980, Kirk Douglas is the tough-ish Navy captain of an aircraft carrier that, during regular maneuvers in the Hawaiian seas, appears to get sucked into an unexplained time vortex that takes the ship back to a few hours before the events of Pearl Harbor.

Between reasonably dealing with Department of Defense liaison Martin Sheen and needlessly arguing with chubby senator Charles Durning, Cap’n Douglas has to decide if he’s going to do something about Pearl Harbor or not while he’s got that burning number on the upcoming events.

What he does — or doesn’t do — leads to one of the most unsatisfying endings I’ve ever seen on film, subdued with a coda I’m sure we all saw coming.

As I watched this flick, directed by Don Taylor and surprisingly associate-produced by Troma head Lloyd Kaufman, I started to wish my dad was still alive — momentarily — so I could have asked him what exactly it was that he liked about this film, especially when he called Douglas an “ass” and Sheen a “communist” whenever they were brought up in everyday conversation.

Now that I think about it, he never said anything about James Farentino … maybe that’s the reason? —Louis Fowler

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Across Latin America, you didn’t see kids lining up for the latest adventures of Batman or Superman, be it at the newsstand or, later, the movie theater. Instead, they had a reigning culture of their own superheroes who never really crossed over into North America (not that they had to), with the best example being Kaliman.

With blessed powers such as ESP, astral projection, telekinesis and, quite obviously, the martial arts, the mysterious Kaliman made his claim to superhuman fame by traveling the globe and solving dastardly crimes with aid of former street urchin and current young ward Solin, who is in training to become Kaliman’s successor — if that ever happens, honestly.

With well over 1,300 issues of the comic book and a string of popular radio dramas — not to mention a lawsuit from the assholes at Marvel — he made his motion picture debut in 1972 with Dallas talking head Jeff Cooper taking on the somewhat muscular lead to great success in many Latin-based countries.

Sadly, I have not seen it. What I have seen, however, is the follow-up, Kaliman en el Siniestro Mundo de Humanon and, man alive, is this one fun flick!

Here, Kaliman spends his time leisurely walking the beaches of Rio and driving in a car. But when his apartment is telepathically burgled and the inhabitants become murderously possessed by a cursed necklace, he and Solin somehow end up in the jungle, searching for the lackluster hideout of Humanon.

Additionally, Kaliman helps Solin form a completely NSFW drinking tube when their thirst gets the best of them, and there’s a doped-up monkey doing scared flips and tricks somewhere in there, too, among all the stock footage of dangerous animals for them to point at and laugh from a distance.

That’s nothing when compared to when we meet Humanon, the red-cloaked, pointy-capped villain (who reminds me of a rather sassy Grand Dragon) and his army of what I’m guessing are zombies to hunt our heroes down and kill them.

As expected, Cooper is completely ridiculous as a supposedly Middle Eastern mentalist, but the ludicrousness of it helped the movie move forward in a very schlocky way that seems like a lost art. Granted, as far as comic book movies go, it’s not going to blow the roof off the Avengers Tower anytime soon, but how about a big budget retelling of the Kaliman mythos? —Louis Fowler

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Like many indie science-fiction flicks, Lapsis has a fantastical premise, but takes a lackadaisical way to get to the rushed ending. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about and have been there before.

Quantum computing, I guess, is the best thing going in this alternate present, with scads of people signing up to run cable through state parks. This seems like an easy enough way for Ray (Dean Imperial) to earn a couple of bucks for his brother who has some sort of made-up fatigue syndrome; after obtaining shady papers, Ray’s in the forest, running wire and dealing with the passive-aggressive jerks he encounters.

There are also robots that look like the mechanical spiders from Runaway — I was almost hoping for Gene Simmons to show up, but that’s how I feel about most movies — that compete with the humans as they lay cable as well, with an underground group of cablers trapping and destroying the robots. I didn’t fully understand the ending, as it just kind of showed up.

With Lapsis in a broken-down sheen that many indie flicks have had for about 20 years, its idea of cabling for a new internet source is honestly remarkable, and Ray’s meeting of the many skewed characters, interesting enough. I don’t know why the spiders were introduced and, by the final third, you give up caring.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this movie really needed Gene Simmons. —Louis Fowler

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