Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Written and directed by Ruben Galindo Jr.
• Starring
  • “Hugo Stieglitz” (Stiglitz)
  • Usi Velasco
  • Erika Buenfil
  • Edna Bolkan
  • Maria Rebeca
• Produced by Raul Galindo
• Executive produced by Rodolfo Galindo

[This review is pulling double-duty -- it's both part of Month of the Living Dead 7, and the Halloween Movie Roundtable organized at Badmovies.org (index of participating reviews here). Because I'm a multi-tasker, that's why.]

Far be it from me to rely on overbroad generalizations — except when it suits my purpose — but when considering foreign cinema, one can usually divide any country’s output into one of two camps:

1. Films which, in both the stories told and the techniques used to tell them, reflect the mores, tropes, and symbols of the native culture — movies that could literally have been made nowhere else, by no one else.
2. The same old crap that gets cranked out and exported by American tripe factories. But this time, we made it! It’s schlock in our own language! Woo!

Cemetery of Terror falls solidly into the second category. I speak no Spanish and had to rely on the subtitles, but I feel safe in saying that my poor opinion of this movie cannot be blamed on subtleties of Mexican culture or cinematic tradition I didn’t pick up on. (Upon which I did not pick? Whatever.) No, I think we can blame the essential dumbness of the movie, a language which is spoken the world over.

Our “star power,” such as it is, is provided by Hugo Stiglitz (as El Santo of 1,000 Misspent Hours and Counting informs us, he was cast in City of the Walking Dead specifically to attract audiences in Mexico). Stiglitz plays Dr. Cardan, and you will grasp his character immediately once I tell you that Dr. Cardan is exactly like Donald Pleasence’s Dr. Loomis, except that Loomis didn’t feel the need to keep his shirt unbuttoned practically to the navel. (And aren’t we all glad.) We are introduced to Cardan in that most heroic of tableaus, “man asleep in front of staticky TV.” Cardan is dreaming about… well, I could keep you in suspense until it all gets explained to us a few scenes later, but let’s just connect the dots right now: Cardan is dreaming about his patient Devlon (Jose Gomez Parcero), a serial killer who is of course a being of “pure EEEvil,” yada yada yada. We don’t see Devlon’s face for several scenes, and when we do it’s something of a letdown, as Devlon looks like nothing more than a meanspirited homeless man. His hands, though, are oddly misshapen and clawlike. A good thing for him, too; let the other cinematic mass murderers rely on wimpy tools and weapons — not Devlon. Machetes? Chainsaws? Garden Weasels^TM? Bah. Devlon uses nothing but his bare hands to claw and carve up his victims, and if that means that most death scenes are going to be poorly edited and unconvincing approximations of people receiving fleshwounds, well, that’s just the price you have to pay for keeping it real.

The dream Cardan has involves Devlon stalking a lone woman in an office building at night, killing her, and then catching a bazillion bullets from the police who show up. And wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly what he finds out happened during the night when the police call in the morning: Devlon escaped from the psychiatric hospital, went on a spree, and got taken down.

Cardan immediately goes to the station to argue with Captain Ancira (Raul Meraz) that Devlon the Satanist needs to be cremated immediately because he’s pure EEEvil, but Ancira holds to procedure, which involves an autopsy and then just a normal burial. They’re probably not even going to chain up the corpse in the casket or anything.

Meanwhile, we’ve had the pleasure of meeting most of the rest of our cast: Three medical students, Jorge, Oscar, and Pedro (Cervando Manzetti, Rene Cardona III, and Andres García Jr.), and their girlfriends, Olivia, Marianna, and Leena (Edna Bolkan, Jacqueline Castro, and Erika Buenfil), and no, there is no pressing need to differentiate them. The boys have a terrific idea: How about we tell the girls that we’ll take them to some posh jet-set party, and instead take them for a private kegger and nookie session at that spooky old abandoned house? Won’t that be fun! Yeah, the girls will really think that’s funny! Also, sweetie, instead of that mink stole I promised you for your birthday, here’s some cat poop! Funny, huh? Hey, why are you hitting me? What’s gotten into you?

And somewhere in here, when we’re not watching our six twentysomethings on a pointless waterskiing excursion (This scene sponsored in part by the local tourism board), we also meet small group of children: Two are Captain Ancira’s, two are neighbor kids, and Tonny (Eduardo Capetillo), the oldest (probably fourteen) is an orphan being raised by his sister. Their only purpose at this stage of the movie is to demonstrate that Halloween, as celebrated in Mexico, sucks. Yes, this is Halloween night, though that fact is only mentioned in the children’s scenes (it’s never noted, for instance, whether the “jet set” party was meant to be themed), and I think there’s exactly one cheap brittle plastic mask between all of the children. They also have a jack-o-lantern, carved out to function as a real lantern. And that’s it. Enjoy yourselves, kids!

So our three groups of people approach the evening thus:

The twentysomethings arrive at the abandoned house and gain entry through the open basement door. As absolutely no one would have suspected, the girls are seriously pissed and refuse to kanoodle. The guys then get an even more brilliantly brilliant idea: It’s a well-known fact that fear makes women melt into the arms of whatever men happen to be adjacent, so let’s creep them out! By stealing a corpse from the morgue! And taking it to the enormous cemetery just around the corner! And attempting to raise the dead, using this big black book full of spookiness we found in the upstairs room of the house with “DEVLON” painted across the cover! (Seriously, could you cram more bad ideas into a single scheme? Wait, they left out “Let’s eat and then immediately go swimming.”)

The kids, as soon as they all link up, immediately decide to go over to the big-ass cemetery because the dead have the best candy it’s Halloween, and it’ll be spooky. Wherever it is they’re starting from, the cemetery is pretty far away, which conveniently takes them out of the picture until needed.

Dr. Cardan forges the signature and seal of the local judge on an order for Devlon’s immediate cremation, and he and Captain Ancira drive over to the morgue (with Ancira idly wondering aloud how Cardan got the order signed with the judge out of town that week — boy, he’s a sharp one!). By the time they get there, though, the medical boys have jimmied the lock on the back door, stolen the ugliest corpse on the premises (Devlon’s naturally), and stuffed it in the back of their hatchback. Question: Aren’t bodies in the morgue usually stripped down? Because Devlon’s still dressed in his molester trenchcoat and hobnailed boots.

Cardan is obviously anxious about this — either that, or his bladder is sending out distress calls — so he steals Ancira’s car to drive around town, looking for a stray corpse. How did he steal the car? Well, Ancira got out to use a phone booth because his wife had called the station, anxious about her kid. Let’s just look at the timeframe here: There’s never a clock to be seen in this movie, but the trick-or-treaters were instructed to be back by 10 o’clock. By this time, they haven’t even arrived at the cemetery which was their destination when they left their own block, so I have a hard time believing that it’s suddenly so late that mothers are freaking out.

The twentysomethings get the body back to the center of the cemetery, and Jorge starts reciting “Satan, come hither” texts from the big black book, in a scene that calls to mind the equally lame Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1972). As ominous thunder sounds and torrents of rain fall (immediately followed by a shot of the glowing full moon in a cloudless sky), they decide to abandon the enterprise — and the body — and make for the abandoned house. Naturally, as soon as they scamper for shelter, Devlon sits up. Hey, whaddaya know! The movie’s about to start!

(Note: Immediately thereafter, the trick-or-treaters arrive at the cemetery. Where it is not raining. Or even damp. Continuity is more than a suggestion, you know?)

Now. Six victims in the abandoned house, all in some stage of kanoodling (fear, rain — whatever gets the girls to shiver, makes them horny!). You would be surprised to see how quickly Devlon kills them all, usually with his bare hands. Only one of the deaths is really worth mentioning on its own, and that because of incompetence: Oscar has been out on the porch swing with Marianna and goes in to freshen up her drink. By the time he gets back, Devlon has dragged her off. Oscar finds her body in the long grass and cautiously looks right, looks left — slash! Devlon’s cruel nails strike out of nowhere, even though Oscar is standing in the middle of the back lawn, well-lit enough to read a newspaper. And again — look right, look left — slash! Seriously, where is Devlon supposed to be hiding?

The only other detail of note: As has been demonstrated many times by slasher flicks, a man’s ears stop working when he’s aroused, meaning that it’s always the girl who hears something and insists on investigation.

So, we’re now 55 minutes into the movie… and we’ve exhausted our convenient pool of victims. Yes, there are the kids (who are just now reaching the center of the cemetery), but you and I both know that it’s the rare and ambitious horror film which will allow a child to be killed, and this movie simply isn’t that ambitious. So instead of any more gore, we’re instead given a chase scene which lasts for the rest of the movie. The kids get spooked by a falling tree and mysterious flames from a grave, they run to the abandoned house, they see the bodies and catch Devlon’s eye, they run back to the cemetery with Devlon in pursuit, they stumble around crying and telling each other to hurry up, and then graves start opening and zombies start chasing them too. (Jorge’s incantation? Devlon’s native Satanic power? Does it matter?) The kids make it aaaall the way back through to the front gate (odd that there’s no fence or wall around the back end of the cemetery, separating it from the abandoned house), which is magically locked, and it almost looks like they might get trapped…

…When Cardan drives up in his stolen police car. How did he know to show up there? He didn’t. Ever since he stole the car, over half an hour of the running time ago, we’ve kept cutting back to shots of him speeding through the city, looking frantically out the windows. I guess, then, that it’s only pure chance that brings him to this exact spot right when he’s needed to bust down the gate. Even then, the car immediately conks out, so he and the children — wait for it — have to run all the way back through the cemetery, toward the house. Why to the house? Because Cardan mentions that they have to destroy Devlon’s book, and Tonny replies that he saw a big black book in the house. (I’d be more accepting of this whole book-as-McGuffin gimmick if it were written on parchment or illuminated in blood or something, but it’s pretty clearly a press-printed book, which means it’s not unique; why is the physical book itself such a powerful talisman?)

I realized that this movie had no more to offer me when Cardan hands one of the children a crucifix to keep the zombies back, and it works. Um, this is a Mexican cemetery; it’s chockful of crosses, with which the zombies seem to have no particular problem. This is the level of thinking that informs the entire movie; it’s called “going into production with a first-draft script,” and it means that the story is divided almost completely into two unrelated chunks, with the “star power” of Hugo Stiglitz given nothing to do for most of the movie.

In other words… Yup. Just like its American precedents.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 9
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 3
• cars that won’t start for no reason: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0