Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Ted Post
• Written by Paul Dehn
• Starring
  • James Franciscus
  • Kim Hunter
  • Linda Harrison
  • Charleton Heston
• Produced by Arthur P. Jacobs

Many people consider this the weakest of the Ape movies. While I’m not sure if it is, I can see why some might think so.

Brent, another astronaut (James Franciscus), traces Taylor’s (Charlton Heston) spaceship’s path to find out what happened to him, and ends up the lone survivor of a similar crashland. In short order he finds Nova, Taylor’s mute girlfriend, who has lost Taylor when he fell into some sort of illusionary rock face in the Forbidden Zone.

Brent follows the path set out by the original movie: He goes with Nova to Ape City, gasps in astonishment at the speaking monkeys, gets help from Zira and Cornelius, escapes, gets captured, escapes again (in a scene that Spielberg must have seen before making Raiders of the Lost Ark), and makes for the Forbidden Zone to find Taylor.

So. Forty-five minutes into the movie, and we’re finally ready to see something that we haven’t already seen in the original.

Well, Brent comes to the same realization that Taylor did, but not by seeing the Statue of Liberty; instead, he stumbles into a cave which connects to an old subway station. He and Nova follow it and discover a race of telepathic humans who still guard, and worship, the last bomb. (The scene where the subterraneans gather in the cathedral to sing that bizarre version of “All Things Bright and Beautiful” is still worth the price of admission; they each remove their false faces for their god, showing the hideous mutation which has left them without skin.)

But the ape army attacks, Brent finds Taylor, yadda yadda yadda (gotta leave something unsaid for anyone who hasn’t seen it) — and we get a very final conclusion.

Now, as to this movie’s Least Favored Sequel status, I can think of two great reasons:

1) Half of this movie was a rehash of the first, and none of it shows the viewing audience anything they haven’t already seen.

2) There is a distinct lack of a specific social theme in this movie. Observe:
The original, in addition to the novelty value of the setting, also focused on religious intolerance, as well as a deserved contempt for “the beast Man” because he had pooped in his own dog dish — a dead-on assessment.
The third movie, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, reverses the scenario, having Zira and Cornelius escape back to the ’70s, encountering first celebrity and then paranoid suspicion as something “other.”
The fourth movie, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, essentially takes on slavery as the masses of ape servants rise against their masters.
The fifth movie — well, I haven’t seen it since I was five years old, so I can’t comment on it.

But this movie has no such specific theme. It’s a melange, a patchwork of various social critiques held together by the march of the ape army. (One brief scene shows the development of a band of chimp beatniks, holding pace banners and lying down before the gorilla column — if you look hard, you can see Lucius, the rebellious teenager ape from the original.) Yes, there’s a heavy anti-bomb message, but it isn’t preached well.

Some Notable Totables:

• Body count: The whole damned planet
• Breasts: 0
• Explosions: 1 (woo-boy!)
• Ominous thunderstorms: 1, badly animated
• Dream sequences: 0
• Actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
  • James Gregory (Ursus, the gorilla general) was Dr. Tristan Adams in the original episode “Dagger of the Mind”
  • Jeff Corey (Caspay) was Plasus in the original “The Cloud Minders” (itself a hideously weak social commentary)
  • Gregory Sierra (Verger) appeared on DS9
  • Lou Wagner (Lucius the chimp boy) did an episode each of DS9 and TNG

See Also