Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Written and directed by Michael Davis
• Starring
  • J.D. Daniels
  • Amy Stock-Poynton
  • Margot Kidder
  • Patrick Renna
  • Richard Moll
  • Stuart Pankin
• Produced by Charles Band and Debra Dion

When Full Moon started its kidvid division, Moonbeam Entertainment, it automatically set itself a new hurdle. It’s hard enough to crank out low-budget genre films that provide some form of entertainment, but with kidvid, that task becomes harder in that you can’t just throw in sex and violence to fill out those empty spaces. Unfortunately, what happened with several Moonbeam flicks (notably Prehysteria — eccch) was that those empty spaces were filled out with nothing but pure stupidity. Beanstalk, however, is surprising; the slack is taken up with wit and cleverness.

Part of the charm is, no kidding, Margot Kidder’s over-the-top performance as Dr. Winston, a crackpot scientist convinced that legends and fairy tales are based on truth. It’s complete kook material, and Kidder performs it with reckless abandon and heaping helpings of slapstick. (Given her much-publicized delusional episodes of a couple of years later, you just gotta wonder how much was acting and how much was giving her inner demons a loose leash.)

As we open, Dr. Winston has finally discovered something that props up her ridiculed theories: Beans. Giant beans, buried near — a giant skull. You may read that either way: a really big skull (about six feet wide), and the skull of a giant. Beans, and a giant. If you know what’s good for you, you know we’re about to cut to…

…A kid named Jack (J.D. Daniels). Jack Taylor, to be exact, a little kid with big ideas that he records on a tape recorder he keeps with him. (Some samples: “Candy-coated vegetables.” “Drive-in five-and-dimes.” “Bath-sized pre-moistened towelettes.”) Jack’s an only child of a widowed mother (Amy Stock-Poynton), and things are a little tight in the small town of Rockville, so Jack is sent to town with a boxful of heirlooms to pawn (including — you guessed it — a porcelain cow). Unfortunately, a run-in with the obligatory bully Danny (Patrick Renna) spells disaster for his box o’stuff; but as he tries to rescue the cow from being smashed in the street, he runs in front of Dr. Winston’s “mobile lab” camper, and as she swerves, this box falls off the top — the box of the recovered beans.

Let me go back here to the bully. If you’re one of the approximately eight people in the nation who saw Disney’s The Big Green, you know this kid; if not, I can describe him briefly by saying, imagine a young, chunky Richard Lynch. He’s also not your standard-issue grade school bully; this one gets straight A’s, and quotes Shakespeare. Hey, it’s not a big deal, but I thought it a nifty little detail.

Because this is an updated version of the story, and because low-budget movies somehow always fall back on capitalism-bashing¹, we get introduced to a “revisionist” heavy: Mr. Leach (Richard Moll), the town banker, one of those slimy gloaters who just looooooves foreclosing on people. And yeah, Mom is behind about six months on the house payment, and Jack’s antagonism of Leach doesn’t inspire him to uncharacteristic kindness (although calling him “Mr. Lurch” is just dead-on). The pay-up deadline is tomorrow at midnight.

Sigh. What’s a boy to do? Well, the first step would be to leave the box of beans out in the back yard, where, in the middle of the night, it can send down roots and shoot up into the sky like a bottle rocket. (And don’t even wonder why the beans never sprouted all those years while buried, but are perfectly willing to germinate from inside a shipping crate. Don’t, I tell you.)

By the next morning, news broadcasts are showing the huge beanstalk jutting into the stratosphere, are well as the instant cottage industry grown up around it: hats with little beanstalks sticking up on top, t-shirts with the inevitable “My friends saw the Rockville beanstalk and all I got was…” message, and Jack charging admission to his backyard. (If I were inclined to attribute subtext to this movie, I would surmise that this display of “good-guy” capitalism is an attempt to contrast the evils of monolithic Big Business, especially a non-industry like banking, with the mythic heroism of old-fashioned entrepeneurship; gotta infuse those impressionable minds with the populist mystique early, you know.)

Of course, Dr. Winston shows up with predictions of doom. I mean, you’ve got a beanstalk and a boy named Jack — of course there’s a giant up there somewhere! Naturally, the townsfolk don’t want to hear anything negative about their new income source, so they run her out.

The other nonplussed personage is Leach, because if the town regains its economic feet, he can’t foreclose on the whole thing and demolish the town to make way for a dam. (Dams = evil. Is this the message we want to pass on to the next generation?) So he leans on the financially-beholden mayor to take the Taylors’ beanstalk-admission earnings in the name of fees and permits and such, leaving them with nothing with which to pay the mortgage.

Out on the street that night, Jack and Mom are taken in by Dr. Winston, who regales them with the whole range of mythic creatures she’s seeking. Along the way, she mentions again the fabled gold of the giant, which sparks Jack’s idea machine…

And off he goes, to climb the beanstalk. Oddly enough, bully-boy Danny accompanies him; their relationship is one of quiet antagonism and grudging acceptance, and it gives Jack someone to talk and make wry comments to as he explores the Land Up There.

What we get here is the main witty conceit of the script: Giants no longer live in castles. This is the Twentieth Century, you know. So what Jack and Danny find at the top is a floating island, covered with tract homes. The giants are living in their version of our 1950s suburbia. And our particular giant (Stuart Pankin) is a roly-poly suburban guy with a wife and little girl, as well as green skin and a huge nose.

Telling you the plot for the entire movie sucks some of the fun out of it, so I’ll sketch out for you the rest: Jack and Danny explore the house and get sighted by the giant, who tries in vain to convince the rest of the family to believe that he actually did see “little people” (which occupy a place in giant mythology right up there with alien Greys) and trap them. There’s tons of forced perspective and split-screen shooting — nothing spectacular, but certainly competent and not distracting. There’s also lots of slimy stuff, more than you’d expect in a kidvid: The giant spits out a mouthful of food twice and sneezes once, and Jack and Danny manage to find themselves in a hugh “Roach Hotel” to emerge covered with bug guts.

Meanwhile, back on the ground, Leach tries his best to get the beanstalk dynamited to the ground, even knowing that the two boys are somewhere above; it comes down to Mom and Dr. Winston to foil his dastardly plans.

The high points here are the performances by Kidder, Moll, and Pankin, each of whom obviously are having the time of their lives. Moll, especially, seems to relish his boogah-boogah role; halfway through, I said, “Someone really ought to cast him as Satan — oh wait, someone has.”

Special effects are adequate — nothing here is stunning, and much of it is in the category of “indicative” FX (i.e., the kind that let you know what the director intended things to look like) rather than “convincing” FX. But hey — how many real giant beanstalks have you seen for comparison?

This isn’t a video that adults will really enjoy by themselves, without kids (like, say, The Iron Giant). But there’s enough wit to keep grown-ups amused and children enthralled. I got it on a five-day rental, and I think my kids watched it at least five times, and were almost in tears when I had to return it. I suppose that qualifies it as a successful movie.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Henry Hayashi (the TV reporter) was “Male Party Guest” in the DS9 episode “Past Tense”

1. Here’s a little relationship that I’ve noticed, which amazes me: The more often a movie falls back on ‘evil capitalists/developers/bankers etc.’ as the antagonist, the more likely the production company is a crank-em-out which could be characterized accurately as ‘evil capitalists’ themselves. Somehow these production companies never notice the scent of irony hanging thickly in the air. [back]