Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Peter Manoogian
• Written by David S. Goyer
• Starring
  • Tracy Scoggins
  • Bentley Mitchum
  • Daniel Cerny
  • Michael Russo
  • Jeff Weston
• Produced by Anne Kelly
• Executive produced by Charles Band

Join me as we take a stroll on Nathan’s Memory Lane, won’t you?

The year was 1992, and I had recently returned from being a Mormon missionary in Japan, to enroll at Brigham Young University. Since I had no car, grocery shopping entailed mooching a ride from a roommate or friend, and commonly I faced a larder stocked only with two boxes of Rice-a-Roni and a freezer-burned Lynn Wilson’s burrito.

But across the parking lot was my salvation: Sounds Easy Pizza & Video. They constantly had coupons in the student paper for $2.50 personal pizzas, and they got quite a bit of my food budget that year. So off I would trot across the parking lot, and naturally, during the twelve minute delay as my pizza cooked, I browsed their video selection. (What a great business model! I still can’t believe they went out of business at the end of that year.) It wasn’t great, but I had two years of movie-watching to catch up on, so I wasn’t that fussy. (My braindead roommates, may they forever rot in hell, even insisted that Highlander 2: The Quickening was a great movie, well worth my 99¢. Did I mention that they can rot in hell?)

And it was there, among the other lackluster videos, that I first encountered a certain box with a surly jack-in-the-box staring back at me. I’d never picked up a Full Moon video before, but hey, the pizza was ready, so I took it.

As you know, it turned out to be a lousy movie, but I did stay tuned for the promised VideoZone after the feature, and was stunned. “Now this,” I said, “is smart marketing!”

Everyone should so fondly remember their first Full Moon video; for good or ill, it colored the way I prowled the video store from that day forward. And so, here’s to you, Sounds Easy, purveyors of filling pizza and paltry videos; may you rest easy in whatever heaven is reserved for pizza joints.

And now, on with the show.

First up, I should mention that the director is Peter Manoogian, who went directly from this movie to shooting Seedpeople (1992), another less-than-great Full Moon product. He’s managed to get a few other director and producer credits since, but has largely managed to slip off the screen. The screenwriter, on the other hand, is David S. Goyer, who has managed to be probably the only Full Moon success story. After doing scripts for Death Warrant and Kickboxer 2, Goyer fell into Charlie Band’s stable and cranked out the scripts for Demonic Toys and Arcade (1994). The same year that Arcade was finally released, Goyer was also called in to work on The Puppet Masters (the Heinlein adaptation, not the Full Moon franchise) — a bad movie, but a big-budget bad movie. Further high-profile work soon arrived, with The Crow 2, Blade, and Dark City headlining the lot. He’s currently been tapped for the scripts for Blade 2 and Ghost Rider. Mr. Goyer, in a word, has Made It.

Knowing what I do about how the industry treats work-for-hire scripts, as well as looking at Goyer’s track record, I cannot in good conscience take him to task for the script that eventually made it to screen. I will say, however, that somewhere down the line there’s someone who’s going to have to take credit for the massive idiocy display which is Demonic Toys.

We open with Tracy Scoggins, sitting in a room filled with clocks and rocking chairs, watching two boys play War (you know, the card game) on the carpet in front of her. At least, this is the dream that Judith (Scoggins) is relating to Matt (Jeff Weston, whom we just saw killed in Puppet Master 2 (1990)), as they wait in their car at night. Judith and Matt are police detectives, it seems — partners who’ve gone one step beyond. They’ve recently moved in together, and Judith spends the entire conversation dropping hints and building up the nerve to tell Matt that she’s pregnant. Matt, on the other hand, is not impressing anyone with his detective skills; Judith has to practically grab his lapels and shout at him, “Your bun’s in my oven!” before it even shows up as a blip on his radar.

That conversation gets cut short, however, when the people they’v been waiting for show up: A couple of gun runners named Lincoln (Michael Russo) and Hesse (Barry Lynch). After seeing their wares, Matt then goes to great lengths to prove what we’ve already suspected, i.e., that he is a World-Class Moron, who shouldn’t even be trusted with a plastic spork, much less a firearm and a badge. See, he pulls a gun on one of the drug gunners, knowing full well that the other one is standing at his elbow. Does he do anything to alert his partner so she can also pull her own firearm? No. Does he maybe think that it might be a good idea to let these small fry go and follow them back to their supplier? No. Is he wearing a wire? Does he have backup planned? Does he deserve to hold on to his life any longer? No, no, and no.

Blam blam, Matt goes down, and the two criminals take off down the alley as Judith pulls her own gun. She then goes to great lengths to demonstrate that she was an appropriate partner for dunder-headed Matt (maybe the captain was trying to get rid of all of the dead wood at once). Sure, she cries a moment over her fallen beloved, and then — she takes off after the bad guys alone! Does she call an ambulance (since Matt’s clearly been gutshot)? No. Does she radio for backup? No. Aargh. I’m no police expert, but I can tell you one thing: These two make the bottom of the list of officers I’d want serving and protecting my ass.

So. Judith scampers after them (lodging a bullet in Hesse in the process), as they take refuge in a huge toy warehouse. Hesse gets left behind and is bleeding all over the place — specifically, on a strangely glowing spot on the warehouse floor.

And now that that’s established, let’s go from these people we don’t care about and meet more people we don’t care about. For starters, there’s the fat-ass security guard, Charnetski (Peter Schrum), who’s not only foul-mouthed but cruelly so. Instead of watching his security monitors (or the B&W TV over on the side that’s showing Puppet Master 2 — ha! comedy!), he instead orders chicken from the local franchise. Why? So we can have introduced to us the individual who will, heaven help us, be the closest thing to a male hero figure we’re going to get. Said person is Mark (Bentley Mitchum), pretty-boy slacker employee of Chunky Chicken, and our illustrious filmmakers are pushing all the wrong buttons to convince us that he’s worth caring about. He smokes over the chicken! He’s needlessly belligerent to his manager! “(Is that a cigarette?” “No — it’s your dick!”) Boy, it makes you positively nostalgic for the posture-less stupidity of Judith and Matt.

Well, as you may have ascertained, the blood from the doomed Hesse drips all over the floor, and awakens… something. And finally, we get some excitement, in the form of a malevolent jack-in-the-box that eats Hesse’s face off.

And what else is going on? Well, Judith is steadily proving that she’s not one whit less the idiot than her late partner. She continues doggedly pursuing Lincoln alone through the warehouse, doing such things as hiding behind shelves when he shoots. (That’s not going to protect you!) Eventually, she traps him in a storeroom, and the door mysteriously locks itself. She rattles the knob, and pronounces them trapped. Hint: It’s a stupid knob-lock, sister! How about kicking it, or ramming it, or shooting it, or…? Grrr.

All right. I’ve frustrated myself enough here, so let me throw you some bones. The Ooogah-Boogah Bad Guy is a demon who manifests as a brown-haired little boy, whose soul has been trapped beneat the warehouse for sixty-six years. (The flashback scene explaining this is hilarious: “You’ve just given birth to a stillborn rubber Satan!”) But because he wants to be born, he’s lured the pregnant Judith to the warehouse, so he can kick her child’s soul out and take its place. (”Lured”? Since it’s established that the demon only woke up due to Hesse’s blood, what luring, exactly, did he do? Did he somehow dull the senses of both Judith and Matt when they were a block away so that they’d take exactly the melonheaded course of action that they did?) And with each death on the premises, he grows stronger — which is why his toy minions are blasting everyone in sight, including a homeless girl in the ductwork who was added just for extra cannon fodder.

As you may well surmise, the evil toys themselves are the stars of the production, and I’ve got no problem with that; they’re deeper and more lifelike than any of the so-called human cast. Adding to the disparity between props and cast is the fact that, unlike the Puppet Master puppets, these toys actually vocalize. (I know you were wondering: What exactly is the difference between this movie and a Puppet Master movie? Now you know.) You’ve got your jack-in-the-box, your ferocious teddy bear (who, in the denouement, manages to grow from a handpuppet to a man-in-suit), your laser-shooting robot (how the $@*%& did the demon manage to make the toy shoot lasers?), and your Baby Oopsy-Daisy, a foul-mouthed little urchin with a sick sense of humor, who likes to sing “Mairzy-Doats.” (For my Canadian reader(s): The fact that his voice bears a passing resemblance to that of Casey from Mr. Dressup only made the experience that much more surreal.) And, just as in the Puppet Master movies, pint-sized toys are more than a match for full-grown adults, if you’ve previously established that the adults haven’t got a half-dozen grey cells between them.

Now, I’m certain you can find enough to hate in the preceding, without me heaping things on. Yet I would be remiss if I did not mention the easily-avoidable technical errors. How about the fact that Charnetski mysteriously changes his footwear between two shots? How about the fact that the yank-chain is clearly visible when the full-sized teddy bear knocks Mark into a shelf of boxes? How about the convenient cardboard creeper peeking out from under Judith’s unconscious form as a baddie drags her across the concrete floor?

So, you ask, are there no redeeming characteristics to this movie? Well, I wouldn’t call them “redeeming,” but there are some very rare instances of competence. The scene in which Judith and Mark blow the hell out of a horde of dolls is always welcome. There are also the demon’s more spectral minions who seek out the hiding humans for him; in a fashion that could only have been inspired by bad pizza and back-to-back viewings of The Shining and Phantasm, these minions are seen as a trio of pinafore-wearing pre-teen girls, peddling around on outsized tricycles with horns-a-blowing, each wearing a gas mask.

But that about covers it. The only incredibly cheap production value that could have been added — simple, sweeping shots of haphazard doll bodies in dim light, say — was eschewed in favor of shelf upon shelf of plain cardboard boxes. In the end, the lion’s share of the pleasure to be derived from this movie comes from the satisfaction that, with every successive death, Darwinism is observed in action.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 6
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 1
• dream sequences: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
  • Tracy Scoggins (Judith) played “Gilora Rejal” (that’s right, Scoggins wore a spoon on her forehead) in the DS9 episode “Destiny”
  • Barry Lynch (Hesse) played “Ensign Stefan DeSeve” in the TNG episode “Face of the Enemy” (he also played “Captain Nikolai Andropov” in the video game “Star Trek: Borg”)
  • Larry Cedar (Peterson, the Chunky Chicken manager) played “Nydrom” on the DS9 episode “Armageddon Game” and “Tersa” in the Voyager episode “Alliances”