Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Ruggero Deodato
• Written by Cesare Frugoni
• Starring
  • Lisa Blount
  • Leonard Mann
  • Willie Aames
  • Richard Lynch
  • Michael Berryman

You know you’ve been reviewing movies like this for too long if a flick can be considered “pretty good” when its only redeeming feature is a shirtless Michael Berryman running around doing his “boogah-boogah” act.

Which is not to say that everything apart from Berryman is crud. In fact, coming from director Ruggero Deodato, best known (or most notorious) for Jungle Holocaust and Cannibal Holocaust, as well as such “classics” as The House on the Edge of the Park, Raiders of Atlantis, and The Barbarians, it’s a surprisingly straightforward adventure story. But still, without the dermaldysplasic Berryman popping up every now and again, it would probably be a fairly easy movie to justifiably forget.

Uh uh. Never on a first date.

Our main setting is somewhere in Central America, where a riverside cocaine lab is hard at work until interrupted by — Michael Berryman with a machete! And not just him, either; he creeps up on the lab, and at his whistle, hordes of Indios climb out of the river with knives and blowguns and take out all of the lab workers. They then proudly present the spoils to Richard Lynch, who lands his seaplane beside the lab right after the massacre.

Meanwhile, in Miami, go-getter reporter Fran (Lisa Blount) and her cameraman Mark (Leonard Mann) are prepared to watch the police bust a threesome of smugglers responsible for getting the cocaine into the country. (Their ingenious operation revolves around a woman bringing the cocaine inside the body of a doll that she disguises as her baby, complete with a minirecorder of baby sounds. Ingenious, except for the fact that the doll looked like a doll from the get-go.) Their trimphant scoop is cut off, however, because somebody got to the threesome before either the reporters or the police, and carved them up. Fran gets some footage of the scene before the cops get there, and also lifts a photograph from the smuggler woman’s handbag. Because, you know, any item in a smuggler’s personal possession is bound to contain some worthwhile clues. The photograph shows a handful of people loading mysterious cargo into a small plan. See? Worthwhile clues, always.

Fran takes the photo to her pimpomatic snitch Fargas, played by none other than Eriq La Salle, whose job description is to hang out in a strip club surrounded at all times by at least half a dozen women shucking their clothes. Determined not to be terribly helpful, he only tells her that there’s a connection with the Jonestown massacre. (You remember — Guyana? The Reverend Jim Jones? I have a suspicion that the younger readers here are going to have to do a Google search to know what I’m talking about.)

“They’re just VCR instructions. How hard could they be?”

It all starts coming together, then. One of the people in the photo is Richard Lynch, whom Fran identifies as Colonel Brian Horne, one of Jim Jones’ right-hand men who supposedly died at Guyana. And wouldn’t you know it, another person in the photo is none other than Tommy Allo (Willie Aames), the son of her very own network boss (Richard Bright), who’s been lost in Central America for a number of years! (The boss’ aide, by the way, is played by Karen Black, who is now officially showing up far too often on my TV screen.) With both a potential news scoop and a personal quest to back her, it’s no wonder she gets the green light for the assignment. Fran and Mark track down the pilot from the photo via the visible markings on the plane, and get him to fly them down to where the photo was taken.

And meanwhile yet again, poor Tommy Allo is a slave in another drug lab camp in the jungle, prevented from escaping by the armed guards of camp boss Vlado (John Steiner), with nary a friend but the similarly enslaved and abused Ana (Valentina Forte). Make no mistake, life sucks for both of them — especially for Ana, whom Vlado loans out as a plaything to the pilots and business associates who pass through. (Thanks, Ruggero, for the loooong and slooow shot of her resignedly submitting to sex with a sweaty grunt. Thanks a lot.) And life gets even worse that day, because who should attack the camp but — Michael Berryman with a machete! And his cadre of Indios fighters! They make short (but gory) work of the workers; Tommy and Ana luckily escape because they were away from camp lighting signal fires for the incoming plane, and had enough lead time to scamper off (separately) into the jungle. As soon as the plane sets down, the pilot also ends up blowdarted, and Fran and Mark also take cover in the jungle (which, you’d think, wouldn’t be too effective a strategy for two city-slickers trying to hide from jungle-born Indios, but you can’t argue with results, can you?)

“Ever since Charles in Charge was cancelled, the projects I’ve been doing are so Mickey Mouse.” (all right, YOU try coming up with captions!)

In the morning they manage to set up their portable satellite uplink so that they can broadcast live back to the station and show footage of the corpses. They also discover Ana, who turns out to be their link to survival, since she knows the location of a second camp twenty miles down the river. The only thing standing between them and their object — aside from diseases, parasites, and the wild animals of the jungle — is Michael Berryman!

To tell the truth, most of their journey from this point forward gets a little silly, as if this movie is trying to give us the longest sustained Hero’s Death Exemption of all time. Rather than cut them all down mercilessly with the help of his posse, Berryman instead plays with them: dropping snakes on them, picking off someone who strays away from the other two (no, I’m not telling), popping out of the water… It seems drastically out of character, but I suppose there’s no other way for our intrepid reporters to survive their hike without the script cheating this way in their favor. (By the way, Berryman’s character is listed in the credits as “Quecho.” But since he never speaks and is never spoken to or referred to, it’s just easier to call him “Michael Berryman,” right?)

Tonight on Fox: When Berryman Attacks!

In case you’re wondering what the final deal is, Colonel Horne isn’t doing what I initially suspected, i.e., trying to quickly conquer a drug empire for himself. No, he’s still on a mission from God, to punish evil-doers and “free humanity from its self-indulgence” by single-handedly destroying the drug trade, using the Indios, still semi-innocent of Western excesses, as his foot-soldiers. (And Berryman. Nobody says where he comes from. Doesn’t much matter.)

It’s a fairly well-paced little adventure, hanging its hopes more on suspense and action than simply Deodato’s standard drawn-out gore. (Not that the gore is absent, by any stretch; Vlado in particular meets a gruesome fate, being posthumously drawn and quartered. And the DVD now in stores contains all of the extra-icky scenes cut from the original R-rated American release.) The cast is something of a plus too, being studded with recognizable (if not “star-quality”) faces, before most of them became junk-cinema in-jokes. And the motivations of the main antagonist Horne are surprisingly sympathetic, even if his method are drastic.

“Wow — an ‘outdoorsy glow’? You really think so?”

On the other hand, if the antagonist is more sympathetic than expected, the protagonists are less so. Granted, Tommy and Ana have a heaping helping of pathos going for them, but they’re more supporting characters than heroes; Fran and Mark are the real movers and shakers, and yet their motivation of career-furthering exploits don’t really pluck at the heart-strings. It’s a movie more of spectacle than character, and as such, I suppose it’s not that bad. Especially when seeing an Italian director’s names usually sets your eyes a little further south on the bell curve.

Some Notable Totables:

(all from the R-rated release)

• body count: 34
• breasts: 22
• explosions: 6
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Richard Lynch (Horne) played “Arctus Baran” in the TNG two-parter “Gambit”
  • Michael Berryman (Quecho) played “Starfleet Display Officer” (under tons of latex) in Star Trek 4, and “Captain Rixx” (under blue makeup) in the TNG episode “Conspiracy”