Synopsis for
Scanners (1981) More at IMDbPro »

The film begins as Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) cruises through a shopping mall scavenging food and cigarettes. When a woman nearby make some remark about his condition Vale looks at her and suddenly she collapse in a convulsion and two men start chasing Vale as he runs from the scene. One of the men fires a dart that hits Vale in the hand and he finds himself waking in a hospital bed looked over by Dr. Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) as he begins to explain why Vale has been subdued. It turns out that Vale is a Scanner, a select group of individuals whose mothers were treated with a drug to aid in their pregnancies, but instead turned their children into mind-reading phonemes who can cause peoples heads to explode. As it turns out there is a concerned national effort by an underground government group to find the Scanners in the country and quell their power because there are those in the Scanner group who seek to kill non-Scanners and take over the world. When Revok (Michael Ironside) is discovered and taken into custody he dispatches his government captors by using his mind-scanning capabilities. Dr. Ruth goes to Vale to convince him to work with the government to ferret out the Scanners and overcome them to make the world safer. Vale meets up with other good Scanners lead by Kim (Jennifer ONeill) and together they take steps to fight the evil-doing Scanners run by Revok.