The Curator of Schlock #73 by Jeff Shuster

Scanners III: The Takeover

Everybody wants to rule the world,

but only Liliana Komorowska deserves to!

If Scanners 3: The Takeover isn’t schlock then I don’t know what schlock is. I know what you want to know. Does this movie feature exploding heads? Yes, it does, but it’s so much more than that, Mainly because of actress Liliana Komorowska and her absurd performance of a super villainess bent on world domination.

The movie starts out at a Christmas party where there are some Scanner deniers.

How dare they? Some doof in a Santa Claus suit wants his friend Alex, a Scanner, to prove to the naysayers that scanning is a real thing.

Alex wants nothing to do with this until one of the naysayers calls him a party pooper. Alex then telekinetically pats her butt before using his scanning powers to make his Santa Claus friend glide slowly across the rug. Some jerk grabs Alex’s shoulder and he loses control, hurling Doofus McSanta Claus out the window of the fortieth floor. Alex’s friend becomes a splat on the pavement, ruining the Christmases of the children looking at the grisly scene. Alex then, predictably, moves to a monastery in Thailand.

Still, this movie isn’t really about Alex. It’s about his sister, Helena Monet (Liliana Komorowska) and her quest to take over the world and be as evil as she can be.

She doesn’t start out that way.  She’s just a boring Scanner who has violent headaches due to the voices swirling in her head. Her adoptive father is trying to find a cure to keep the scanning at bay. This cure comes in the form of tiny electrodes you stick behind the ear. Unfortunately, this cure comes with some side effects. The electrodes turn you evil!

Evil Helena has a Polish accent and perfectly groomed eyebrows, which makes her perfect for world domination. When a bird craps on her at breakfast time, she explodes it with her mind. When her jerk boss at the satellite company refuses to give her a promotion, she makes him dance around in his underwear in front of the clientele of a five star restaurant. She later makes him dive head first into an empty swimming pool.

Evil Helena goes back to some mental institution where this old scientist did horrible experiments on her when she was little. She explodes his index finger with her mind.

Evil Helena then grabs a Polaroid camera, making the doctor say cheese right before exploding his head.

She complains about how the eyes always come out red in Polaroid photos. Ha! An orderly comes after and she telekinetically makes him pee his pants. Ha! She then sets the captive Scanners free, telling them that they don’t have to be at the bottom of the dung heap. They can be at the top.

Of course, it’s not all business for Evil Helena. She also likes to have fun, if by fun you mean sipping champagne in a Jacuzzi naked while you drown your adoptive father so you can take over his drug company. She then forces the board to declare her president, makes her new personal assistant ditch his girlfriend, has her way with him while discovering she can use her Scanner abilities to control people through television air waves. With her Scanning abilities allowing her to take over all the world’s television stations and pharmaceutical companies, Evil Helena is poised to takeover the entire world. And why not? If we’re going to have a world dictator, at least we can sleep easy knowing she has perfect eyebrows.

Five Things I Learned from Scanners 3: The Takeover

1. Don’t bring a gun to a Scanner fight.
2. One world dictatorship isn’t so bad.
3. Scanners can blow up heads underwater with relative ease.
4. Nimbo Bimbo is Canadian for Nurse Practitioner.
5.  Never invite a Scanner to your Christmas party!

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Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.