Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Krishna Rao
• Written by Krishna Rao and Raman Rao
• Starring
  • Rutger Hauer
  • Losh Charles
  • Stuart Wilson
  • Andrea Roth
  • Perry Anzilotti

A movie like this one doesn’t qualify for hyperbole from either end of the spectrum. It’s not superlative; it’s not horrendous. It certainly doesn’t hurt going down, despite being a fairly unambitious production. If there’s a particular complaint to pin on this one, it’s that the “hook” concept — interdimensional guerrilla warfare, and the convoluted goings-on associated with it — is simply too rich and meaty, to fertile with nifty ideas, to be dealt with without more production oomph to back it up.

Well, that and the occasional slips into numbing stupidity, like the one on display in the opening scene. Twenty years ago, a mysterious archaeologist explores a mysterious tomb in mysterious Albania (can you stand the tension of a full two minutes of a flashlight beam lancing through dusty air?) and opens a crypt to pull a carved sceptre from a corpse’s hands. Just as he does so, though, other mysterious guys in suits (aha! evil!) show up, take the sceptre from him, and demand to know where the other part of it is. “Somewhere you’ll never find it,” the archaeologist bravely says.

“Dude, seriously — I’m the one with the career prospects, okay?”

Well, yeah, that’s true — unless the bad guys ever think to check with his wife or son.

Twenty years later, the son in question, Joe (Josh Charles — twenty films later, I still think of him as “one of those Dead Poets Society kids”), is an L.A. college student with some serious social problems. One is that he hasn’t been able to get back on his feet after his last girlfriend dumped him; the other is that one of his two best friends is a pre-stardom Jack Black, bellowing and grunting like an entire frat house rolled into one sweatshirt.

Joe thinks his luck may about to change when stunning and intense blonde Laura (Andrea Roth) starts checking him out from across the room at a party. Well, it is changing, but not the way he’d like, because Laura’s really after one thing: The crystal Joe wears on a thong around his neck. As far as Joe’s concerned, it’s just a souvenir of his long-lost dad, but Laura’s interest in it is a little more expansive: it’s a key part of a device that may help her people free her enslaved home dimension. (Yes, that sentence just begs to be followed by a joke, doesn’t it?)

To get the other half of the McGuffin, she drags Joe along through a hailstorm of enemy bullets to something he never thought he’d see: Rutger Hauer welding his balls. Hauer is A.T., a former agent in the interdimensional conflict who’s now retired and lives in a TARDIS-like motel room (bigger on the inside than on the outside), where he creates huge metallic modern-art spheres. (And yes, I’m just including those details to justify the “welding his balls” line.) A.T. naturally wants nothing to do with Laura’s mission until he finds out whose kid Joe is, at which point he grudgingly shrugs back into his bad black trenchcoat out of a sense of duty.

Rutger Hauer, welding his balls. (If it’s funny once…)

The other half of the device is, of course, the sceptre from the prologue. Together, the crystal and sceptre can transport people not only to any place in our world, but to the titular Crossworlds (will you please stop giggling every time I use the world “titular”? it’s a perfectly good word!), sort of the antechamber leading to any of a dozen different dimensions. Individual mystics and such can cross the dimensional divide on their own, the sceptre is necessary if you’re going to transport larger numbers of fighters and grunts, either to conquer a dimension or to fight back against the enslaving warlords.

That’s right, there are bad guys here, led by Ferris (Stuart Wilson, last seen around here in No Escape), who spends his days posing as the curator of the museum where the sceptre is on display, just waiting for idealistic freedom fighters to come in after it. Pretty soon, battle is joined — a battle that rages all over the multiverse!

“Um… Laura? We got spooky lighting here — that’s not good.”

Or all over convenient parts of California, anyway. There are some cost-cutting measures that use their understated nature to good advantage: The simple CGI ripple effect that results whenever someone pops the crystal into the sceptre, the simple camera tricks to show transitions of space and time. But it seems that while the sceptre can bend the laws of spacetime, it can’t breach the restraints of budget, and thus everything takes place either in California or an alien dimension that looks just like California. When A.T. uses the sceptre to send them someplace random to escape from Ferris, they end up on a rocky seashore — which is promptly visited by surfers. When Ferris makes a deal with A.T. and sends Joe and Andrea someplace out of his hair, they land face-down in gritty sand… in a local playground. And in one of those twists of cosmic fate, Crossworlds itself looks exactly like a Mojave desert valley (but with a red filter on the camera).

Hubba.

But if things fall apart on the macro level, the micro details are still perfectly adequate. Rutger Hauer is, of course, one of the coolest people on the planet, and he’s here in a role which doesn’t pretend he’s still a young action hero; he’s the crusty-but-tough soldier roped back out of retirement. Josh Charles plays Joe as a young man of uncertain confidence but a level head, and deftly keeps him from descending into annoying whininess as he tries to get A.T. and Laura to stop long enough to explain what the hell is going on. Andrea Roth is very easy on the eyes, and Stuart Wilson eschews malevolent scenery-chewing in favor of the easy-going attitude which accepts base evil as part of the cost of doing business. And I have to note Perry Anzilotti as Ferris’ henchman Rebo, who also shows remarkable restraint in a role that begs to be played as an over-the-top Peter Lorre pastiche.

In fact, “restraint” is the saving grace of the production. With true universe-spanning spectacle out of the question, Krishna Rao wisely gives us a uniformly understated production so that the budgetary restrictions don’t chafe as visibly, and also refrains from using cheaper substitutes (you know, breasts’n'explosives’n’stuff).

The ripple effect. (Imagine a harp run.)

Crossworlds obviously never got a theatrical release, and that’s for the best; the low-key approach would have seemed bloodless and anemic. As it is, the best vibe Crossworlds gives off is that of a made-for-TV movie, a production that has pretty stringent limitations and works professionally within them.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 6
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 3
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Ellen Geer (Joe’s mom) played “Dr. Kila Marr” in the TNG episode “Silicon Avatar”
  • Michael Wiseman (”Cop #2″) played “Beta Hirogen” in the Voyager two-parter “Flesh and Blood”