Scanners III: The Takeover (1991) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by Ian West ★★★★ 2

  Scanners III opens during a Christmas party in a highrise apartment building where a dude accidentally scans his best friend (who’s dressed as Santa) over a ledge and he plummets to his death while children watch from the streets and an overhead shot zooms in on Santa’s dead mangled body while kids and parents are hovered around him and Christmas jingle music plays. Then the screen says SCANNER 3: THE TAKEOVER and just like that.. YEP—definitely my favorite Scanners movie!

  It’s almost like a Cannon films Scannersjam and I’m all about that. There’s another great head explosion—and a finger explosion, a group of alley punks that get scanned into the back of a garbage truck, a guy gets scanned into…

• Review by pd187 ★★★★ 4

  a "scanners," dorkily

  why is this a comedy?? wildly, entertainingly-shot & packed with goofy, horny & unsettling moments like when (spoilers) a woman scans a pigeon. u wont believe its not a wynorskiquel ala ghoulies iv 976-EVIL ii return of swamp thing etc

• Review by Ian West ★★★★ 2

  This is such a nutso movie, even after an absurdly awesome intro that you think can’t get topped during the run time, Scanners IIIDELIVERS!

  
  As far as the other movies in this franchise go for me.... Cronenberg’sScannersis runner up to this, followed by the funScanner Cop 1 and 2(AKAScanners: The Showdown), and lastly—Scanners II.I’m very pleased to live in a world where there are 5 of these movies.

• Review by Tony the Terror ★★★★ 3

  After the lackluster part 2, it’s really great to see part 3 take a sharp turn straight into bananas territory!

  A “sweet young thing”, as the plot description so awfully states, picks up a plastic button and slaps it on her neck and turns into a psycho money hungry sex starved scanner! The rest of the movie is just terrific with Buddhist monks, kung fu fighting, the absolute peak of bizarre early 90’s fashion and interior design, and plenty of that great Eye Acting! Apparently when a scanner does their thing they can’t do it without bulging their eyes and snapping their necks all over the place and it really seems like their mental abilities are extremely stressful but also fun!

  This was exactly what I needed after a ridiculously long week. The lead actress sounds exactly like Lara Wendel in Ghosthouseand if that’s not a solid endorsem*nt then I honestly don’t know what is.

• Review by Slig001 ★★★½ 1

  Second sequel to David Cronenberg's classic Scanners and it's from the same director as the first sequel. This one is quite a remarkable improvement on the second film. Part three once again takes the basic scanner concept and weaves a new story with it. This time we focus on two scanners - brother and sister - who find themselves at odds with each other after the sister takes an experimental drug and subsequently goes off the rails! The film works because it is a near constant stream of action and various scanner shenanigans. Liliana Komorowska is great in the lead role. She's a strong lady who knows what she wants, a real feminist icon! All the best bits involve Komorowska…

• Review by Carlo V 4

  MonuMENTALLY stupid sh*t. In the opening minutes alone you've got a guy scanning a girl's butt with a funny sound effek so I'm legit suspecting Christian Duguay of ghost directing this for Jim Wynorski. It's hard enough to keep a straight face when people are making crazy scanning faces, but this movie almost exists on a level of parodying the original and you can tell they actually thought they were making ALL the right choices. Favorite part is when Helena is scanning her boss into doing a striptease dance in a crowded restaurant to some public domain electronic conga song, and then chucks him into a piano.

• Review by Helen_S ★★★★★ 6

  And the insane fun continues. Forgotten how much humour is in this one. Liliana Komorowska hammed it up good style as a Scanner who goes bloody mental after trying out a new treatment. Unlike the last film brother and sister are on opposing teams here. The opening Christmas scene was so good, the main head explosion was glorious along with the less showy ones like the one in the water. There was also a lovely crunchy neck break. Love a good neck break haha. I like some of the other little touches too like how she would control people on and through the TV. Wish Christian Duguay had directed more horrors. His 2 Scanner films and Screamers are all great!

• Review by Zay ★★★★

  Scanners 3 oozes that 90s charm that has only really started to show over the last few years. I enjoyed it way more than Scanners 2.

  The cast was great. The lead antagonist, Liliana Komorowska was devilish and sexy as hell(dug her new power to control ppl through the tv). The lead protagonist, Steve Parrish, had that cornball charm about him. The nutty nurse character was bonkers. And Valerie Valois as Dr. Joyce Stone was great too. The three gun toting scanners in the school bus had me cracking up.

  The kills were fun. Two really good head explosions, one under water. I loved the revolving door death scene. The guy is just spinning n spinning then u see his…

• Review by belial_carboni ★★★ 3

  More enjoyable than part 2. Still very hokey and flat at times but it comes a lot closer to accomplishing what part 2 tried to do. I also think it gets a lot closer to the so bad it's good category so the cheesy acting and terrible dialogue are actually entertaining here. It also seems like more of a natural flowing film instead of the try hard vibe of part two.

  I still can't stand that lead actor though. Him and his weird face. Too weird. The lead actress was awesome though. She had that perfect mix of quirkiness and over dramatic acting that made her a fun villian.

  I liked a lot of the spontaneous scenes like the alley…

• Review by laird ★★★½ 10

  Made back to back with SCANNERS II with the exact same crew, but with totally and tonally different results. Any lingering vestigial evidence of Cronenberg's eerie apocalyptic vision is shed in favor of straight up goofball antics and over the top scanner telekinetic gore bombs. There's even a reference to those "I had a headache this big" commercials. It approaches some satire of sexism in the workplace and corporate media consolidation, but then kindly walks back to being about actors making funny faces while sh*t flies around. It can't sustain any kind of energy or tone, but when it goes for it, it's undeniably silly fun, the two leads vamping through underwater scanner fights and various dismemberment via telekinesis scenarios. Thanks for repeatedly telling me to watch this for the past two years, Bret Berg.

• Review by Naughty aka Juli Norwood ½ 2

  Abysmal failure!

• Review by Dan McCoy ★★★½ 2

  This film has a mid-air exploding motorcycle, an inflating head that looks even sillier than the one in Big Trouble in Little China, kung-fu fights, a comically terrible female lead who does things like writhe topless while scan-murdering her dad in the hot tub, a sexy nurse scanner, a scene where the villain makes a dude dance to keyboard music and strip to his boxers, and all sorts of other nonsense leading to a truly surprising ending.

  Basically it feels like someone was asked to turn a screenplay for a “Zapped” sequel into a “Scanners” movie, and then decided it need more of everything. It’s not good, but it’s lurid and easy to love.