Tim Thomerson

The comic timing is the load-bearing part. Thomerson is an actor and a comedian, and the comedy is why a man who spent decades in low-budget science fiction never once looked embarrassed to be there.

Trancers made him Trooper Jack Deth, and he kept the character across Trancers II, Trancers III and Trancers 5: Sudden Deth, with the same character turning up years later in Evil Bong. The performance works because he plays a preposterous premise with total conviction and lets the jokes come from the character's exhaustion instead of from winking at the audience. He did exactly the same thing as Brick Bardo in Dollman and Dollman vs. Demonic Toys.

The studio credits show what he could do with a budget behind him. Loy Colton in Near Dark is the best thing on this page. Uncommon Valor, Volunteers, Iron Eagle, Who's Harry Crumb? and Air America are the 1980s mainstream run, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas gave him a hoodlum in a film built almost entirely out of faces like his.

What the video-shelf reputation hides is the range underneath it: Honkytonk Man, The Osterman Weekend, Car Wash, Remember My Name, A Wedding, Rhinestone. Directors who wanted a particular dry American voice knew where to find him. He belongs to a category the industry barely has any more, the genre lead who is too good for the genre and stays anyway.