YMMV / Scanners II: The New Order

• Alternative Character Interpretation: How sincere Forrester is in his ruthless quest to destroy crime, or whether it's just a means to another end. While it's established that he craves power as well, he seems genuinely sickened by the criminals plaguing his city.
• Complete Monster:
  • Commander John Forrester is a cop who claims to be using scanners to clean up crime and establish a New Order for the people. Revealing himself to be a sociopath who wishes to turn his city into a Police State where everyone's under the control of his scanner army, with himself as mayor, Forrester recruits scanners to join his cause and gets them addicted to Ephemerol 2 to remain by his side, with many dying from the drug's effects. Having the Chief of Police killed in an attempt to claim his spot, Forrester later kills the mayor for knowing too much about his plan, then tries to kill hero David Kellum from behind after his plans have been revealed to the public.
  • Peter Drak is a psychopathic scanner whose first act is to blow up a packed arcade hall with everyone luckily escaping in time, before he joins Forrester simply for the drugs he provides him and for the thrill of killing people. Drak murders the Chief of Police by psychically forcing him to eat his own gun; murders David Kellum's mother just because he could—making sure the sheriff's office hears him shooting her over the phone—gleefully blows up his associate Gelson's head while Gelson was possessed by David; and repeatedly attempts to devour David's mind. Drak is content to see his fellow psychics reduced to a slow death through their addiction to Ephemerol 2, not caring for anything other than the power rush of mutilating and murdering people with his mind.
• Moral Event Horizon: Peter Drak crosses it when he murders David's elderly mother while letting the police department hear him pull the trigger on the other end of a phone line.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Officer Gelson's death by Drak. His whole body bloats up and his eyes go white as Gelson can only stand there in agony before his head explodes. It arguably comes close to the first movie's cranial trauma in terms of spectacle.
  • The close-up shot of Peter Drak's smoking, desiccated corpse at the end. He really had it coming, but still.

---