Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Chuck Bail
• Written by Sheila Goldberg, Ovidio G. Assonitis, and Alfonso Brescia
• Starring
  • Stephen Collins
  • Janet Julian
  • Lance Henriksen
  • Bo Svenson
• Produced by Ovidio G. Assonitis

With the following faint praise, I heartily damn this movie:

“If it starred David Heavener, it’d be one of his top five.”

You may think I’m being petty and cruel. Far from it; I’m being kind. Kinder than this movie was to me. For ninety-five minutes, I was assaulted by fantastically bad science, irrational plot devices, shoddy technical aspects, an unstintingly annoying score, and more Jabootuan terms than one can shake a stick at (you’d better check this page out if you don’t know what I’m talking about; this knowledge will serve you well here and elsewhere). My wife could hear me whining, “Make it stop!” from the other room after only twenty minutes.

Worst of all, the plasma ball represents a full 28% of the feature’s budget.

Just because it’s never too late to start that sinking feeling, the first misgivings — nay, full-blown portents of doom — are felt before the credits have even finished, as Stephen Collins gives us an expository voiceover: He’s cowboy physicist David Lowell, who’s convinced that he’s found a way to derive a clean, sustainable energy source from sound. (Huh? Just wait, it gets better.) Since everyone quite rightly snorts at his suggestion, he’s leased a secluded canyon in Utah — the titular Choke Canyon — in which to conduct a definitive experiment: With his panel upon panel of flashing computer lights (including, naturally, a plasma ball), he’s waiting for the approach of Halley’s Comet. Why? Because the comet’s proximity will alter the earth’s gravitational pull enough to enable to high-pitched sound waves that will power his energy source and prove his theories are correct. (It’s at about this point that I begin to suspect that the script was actually written by a clubhouse of eleven-year-olds who had gleaned their entire knowledge of physics from half-remembered Fantastic Four back issues.)

Not all of this is in the voiceover, thank goodness; after all, how would we then take note of the plasma ball? No, Lowell has also invited his old university mentor Rachel Patterson (Victoria Racimo) to see his flashing computerized lab, built with his own hands. It takes little more than the exhibition of the plasma ball to convince her that he’s honestly on to something. “I’m glad you passed freshman physics,” she jokes, which is probably the single most pathetic use of an Informed Attribute in cinematic history.

But naturally, all is not well in the Pseudo-Science Kingdom. The canyon being leased is actually the property of the Pilgrim Corporation, a particulary nefarious business concern owned by John Pilgrim (Nicholas Pryor), whose main business concerns seem to be operating unsafe nuclear reactors, secreting hazardous waste in unsecured locations, making prissy comments at the protestors outside his corporate offices, and drowning the occasional kitten just for fun. His latest necessarily EE-vil project is offloading some nuclear waste into a secluded canyon somewhere. Unfortunately, as his right-hand man Brooke Allastair (Lance Henriksen) informs him, the canyon in question is the one that they’ve leased to Lowell for ninety-nine years. See, this is what happens when you change your business plan in mid-stride.

“So? Do the glasses make me look corporate?”

Pilgrim sends out a couple of suits to persuade Lowell to leave his Homestead of Science by nightfall for $250,000. Of course this doesn’t work, because Lowell’s got nine days before his window with the comet to test his equipment. Alastair and Pilgrim then conference call him and try to persuade with more dollar signs (being capitalists, that’s the only way they know to negotiate, right?). When Lowell steadfastly refuses to give up his lease, they fall back on the only option left to them.

Excuse me, the only jaw-droppingly stupid option open to them: they send two 4×4 trucks with goons up to break into Lowell’s lab, beat him up (but intentionally not kill him), and blow up the entire building. Now, let’s see what kind of plan this is: The Pilgrim Corporation wants to surreptitiously store illegal waste out here in the hinterlands, and apparently this is the only godforsaken canyon they own. So they’re going to make sure that it stays hush-hush by roughing up the legitimate leaseholder, destroying his possessions, using explosives without (one assumes) the necessary permit, and then just assume that Lowell’s not going to go running directly to law enforcement officials who would be more than happy to check Mr. Pilgrim into the old Grey Bar Hotel?

Fortunately for the Pilgrimites, Lowell’s just as stupid and counterintuitive as they are. After escaping from the goons in very Indiana Jones-ish fashion (and causing both 4×4s to go over a cliff — looks like he just racked up four deaths there), he loads his meagre unexploded possessions onto his horse and goes to find a cave to hide in while he discovers Pilgrim’s nefarious plan.

“Didn’t you hear me? I said I want the BIG medicine ball!”

Which turns out to be a continuation of his theme of general corporate stupidity. He helicopters in a huge ball containing the waste up to the isolated installation, and leaves three security guards to watch over it. Since they assume that Lowell is taken care of, I guess that that’s supposed to be a permanent security position: Sit in the cabin and watch the ball. Whee. Don’t bury it, don’t conceal it — put it on a pedestal in the middle of the compound courtyard.

Lowell starts fighting back that night, setting explosives around the compound to HOLD ON THERE, BUCKY! Where the Sam Hill did Lowell, who currently has three saddle blankets and a hat to his name, come up with high explosives and the remotes necessary to set them off? I’ve obviously given more thought to this movie so far than the entire production staff did during the writing and production of it. Anyway, he leaves a note on a tied-up guard that he wants everybody cleared out and his lab rebuilt.

Pilgrim suddenly starts worrying that Lowell might go to the authorities (finally occurred to you, did it? how did you become head of a major corporation again?), and instructs Alastair to call in… “the Captain.” Who turns out to be Bo Svenson, scowling his way through an embarrassingly bad role. Poor Bo; he perpetually wears an expression which conveys his disgust at the parts he has to take to pay the rent. Unfortunately, that face is also dead-on for the part of a world-weary mercenary, such as he plays here — so the more disgusted he gets with these roles, the more of these roles he gets. It’s truly a vicious cycle.

Apparently he had to skip English 101 to get those stunning grades in Freshman Physics.

What’s so embarrassing about this role? Well, the Captain’s about as competent a merc as Pilgrim is a corporate head. He goes off to track Lowell and ends up ambushed easily in Lowell’s cave. Much of that conversation is inaudible thanks to location sound, but we do get to hear the Captain try to up his stock my claiming that “I have allowed you to trick me so that we could have this conversation.” Yeah, he’s got you right where you want him, huh, Cap? Lowell manages to return him to the compound trussed up in an oil barrel. Then the Captain calls in two more mercs to help out, and they shell all the caves in the surrounding canyons — but when it’s pretty apparent that Lowell’s on the run, the Captain declines to go up after him; “he’ll come down to us,” he opines. Which he does, in the middle of the night — and while the Captain and his two cronies are watching intently out the windows of the Mercmobile RV, Lowell still manages to rope the RV up, lift it in the air with a crane, and deposit it on top of a building. In what organization was this guy a Captain, the Girl Scout Cookie Brigade?

The movie continues apace, with idiocy unabated; I’ve decline to note the “It’s in the script” moments simply because, applied evenly and consistently, this entire review would be peppered with “IITS” notations averaging three per paragraph.

Things take a turn from plain dumbassness to actual moral repugnance when Lowell somehow cleans up and gets himself a tuxedo, crashes Pilgrim’s dinner party in Salt Lake City, and flirt with Pilgrim’s daughter Vanessa (Janet Julian). We’ve seen her before, mostly passively disapproving of her father’s rapacious greed; of all her father’s cronies, she’s the only one who’s had the smarts to track down an actual photograph of Lowell, so she recognizes him at the party and plays along. After skipping the dinner party and dining on hamburgers (local color note: they do at least get one thing right — Crown Burger, where the couple dines, does indeed serve one of the best burgers in this great land of ours), Lowell calmly kidnaps her, drives her back out to the canyon, tosses her in an old mine pit, and then blackmails Pilgrim and Alastair into rebuilding his lab in three days or else one of his magical explosive charges will kill her. And to prove he’s serious, he’s set other explosive charges at random around the area to go off every five hours to remind them. This, we’re supposed to accept as being perfectly justifiable heroic behavior. Nowhere is it even intimated that Lowell has crossed a line, that he’s become even morally ambiguous. Heck, after Vanessa escapes forty-eight hours later (by finally realizing that she can [gasp!] stack the accoutrements of her prison to climb up to the trap door), she spends about four minutes being angry at Lowell before making out with him. Apparently even she can see that he’s the Designated Hero, unjustifiable situational ethics be damned!

No good, Bo. We know it’s you.

The final half hour of the movie is taken up almost entirely with aerial stunts, as Lowell and Vanessa steal the Great Toxic Ball with a helicopter to reveal Pilgrim’s EE-vilness to the world (or at least to Salt Lake City) while the Captain and a henchman chase him in a biplane. I’m thinking that skin-of-one’s-teeth aerial irresponsibility with a load of radioactive bi-products scarcely exhibits Lowell’s great regard for the big picture, but after the whole “kidnapping for the cause of safe energy” episode, it’s scarcely a pecadillo. Certainly when he sets the thing down on the lawn of the Utah State Capitol Building (and all of five government employees run out to see what’s going on), nobody says, “Get that damned irradiated thing off the premises!” (This was shot, by the way, back in 1984, before the Utah Film Commission started turning a brisk business, and apparently local government was willing to prostitute its public facilities for impoverished Italian-backed productions like this one.)

To keep this from growing to Beggian proportions, I’ve skipped over all manner of minor grievances: the plastic geography of Utah, the fact that road blocks are clearly visible in an “unplanned” landing in the middle of a small-town street, the sudden appearance of snow all over the ground for all of thirty seconds… I can think of exactly one thing done right in this movie: “Halley’s Comet” isn’t mispronounced. But considering all of the other inanities attributed to the comet, that doesn’t really mitigate much.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 26
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• homages to Raiders of the Lost Ark: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Stephen Collins (Lowell) played Captain (demoted to Commander) William Decker in Star Trek: The Motion Picture