Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Written and directed by Barrett J. Leigh and Thom Maurer, based on the short story by H.P. Lovecraft
• Starring
  • William Sanderson
  • Fountain Yount
  • Kurt Hargan
  • Marco St. John
  • Rachel Mellendorf

Though packaged as one of the quickie D2DVD titles on the video store new release wall, Beyond the Wall of Sleep is actually an independent labor of love, churning through post-production for several years after its abbreviated location shoot. Its co-writers and co-directors, Barrett J. Leigh and Thom Maurer, readily admit its flaws on the commentary track, noting that their main audience will probably be Lovecraft fans and genre film buffs who just can’t wait to write scathing reviews on the internet. But along with a frank admission of the movie’s faults, they also express an inarguable sincerity: They had tried to expand a short, early Lovecraft story in as authentic a manner in which they could, and hoped that the Old Man of Providence would have approved of their effort, if not necessarily the final product.

Test tubes? Of colored liquids? But that must mean — there’s SCIENCE going on here!

None of which means that one is required to like the movie. But it is certainly possible to appreciate it without much enjoying it.

The premise (for those of you not up-to-snuff on your early, obscure Lovecraft stories) is that Joe Slaader (William Sanderson, filming here just before his run on Deadwood), an inbred idiot from the Catskills, is brought to an asylum in upstate New York in the early 1900s, having been found not guilty of a string of gruesome murders in the hill country by reason of insanity. Joe is just as confused, in his feeble-minded way, at how he could have committed such atrocities. The best he can explain is that he goes to sleep at night, and then, “I wake with bad things.”

“Darryl? And Darryl?? Where are you guys?!”

Unfortunately, this isn’t the most therapeutic facility to which he could come. The closest thing we have to a protagonist is Edward (Fountain Yount), an intelligent intern at the asylum. Unfortunately, his intelligence is unbounded by ethics and egged on by ego; he’s already been using the inmates for his private experiments, including his perpetual experimentee, Ardelia (Ardelia), whom he keeps in an unused room in the basement where he experiments with thought control via wires he strings directly into her exposed brain.

And in that regard, he’s in line to run the joint. Of the three doctors officially in charge, Dr. Fenton (Marco St. John, with an inexplicable German accent) is the most sympathetic, though mainly because he’s the top dog and has nothing to prove in his control over his patients’ treatment. Dr. Wardlow (Kurt Hargan), however, is a sneering belittling little powermad egomaniac who takes “sawed-off runt” to heights previously unimagined. When the two of them go toe-to-toe over Joe’s treatment as with everything else, the DVD actually exudes the odor of piss and testosterone. And Dr. Barnard (Rick Dial)? He mostly tries to stay out of the way of the Dueling Penises with Doctorates.

Jeez. Just pull out a tape measure and get it over with.

So while the doctors snipe and sneer at each other, Edward takes the investigation of Joe as his own project. Joe has vestigial organs protruding from his back, lumps that resemble hands and a face, and Edward suspects that a subsumed twin is the source of his mysterious and murderous actions. He’s got his electrical gizmo that he’d been using to hook up to Ardelia, which he hopes to use to contact the consciousness buried within Joe.

Unfortunately… he does. And gruesome death ensues.

The most striking aspect of the movie is the intense visual imagery. Shot in 35mm on a shoestring budget, the filmmakers chose a striking visual motif: The main “real” scenes of the movie are shown in black and white, while the dreams or any scenes in which the influence of the unseen entity is felt are shown in color schemes of varying fidelity. The dream and dreamlike segments are intensified by jumpcuts, distorted images, layered footage, and every editing trick in the bag. The first three minutes worried me that I’d be watching an hour and a half of MTV on crack; fortunately things calmed down somewhat, but never so much that the visual character of the movie became less impressive. I don’t normally credit editors by name, but so much of the impact of this movie relies on the confident succession of imagery that Dan Gutman deserves recognition by name.

Best Gong Show act ever.

On the other hand, there are flaws, and they are big. The level of acting skill is the most inescapable. William Sanderson is the most seasoned pro here, of course, but his role is largely of a single note, that of a thick-skulled redneck. Just about everyone else falls somewhere in the continuum between grade-school play and community theater, each doing it wrong in a different way. Fountain Young as Edward simply doesn’t have the fanatical gravitas to pull of the egotism of the Frankensteinian medical intern, and instead comes across as one of those role-playing geeks you knew in high school who didn’t know how to communicate like a human being. On the other hand, Kurt Hargan as Dr. Wardlow is of the “Bruce Campbell Is Too Subtle” school of scenery-chewing, and sneers so hard you start to worry if one of his facial tendons has snapped.

Running neck and neck with the performances is the character of the script they’re called upon to perform, exhibiting a tin ear for dialog rivalling Lovecraft’s own. And aside from Ardelia’s amazing flip-top cranium, most of the practical makeup FX are embarrassing; the seams on the appliances on Joe Slaader’s back are their most visible detail.

Possibly not the most comforting visage one could hang on the wall of an insane asylum…

The final result is intriguing and instructive for those of us who have a more professional or academic in independent filmmaking, and certainly exhibits a flair for visual storytelling backed up with a sincere creative drive. But for the viewer whose interest in movies is more centered in their entertainment value rather than their construction and undergirding, this movie will probably prove deeply unsatisfying.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 23
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 2
• dream sequences: 4
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Michael Fairman (the voice of the older intern, who gives us our occasional narration) played “Vendor” in the DS9 episode “In the Hands of the Prophets”