Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Albert and Charles Band
• Written by C. Courtney Joyner
• Starring
  • Jeffrey Combs
  • Yvette Nipar
  • Brian Thompson
  • Jay Acovone
• Produced by Charles Band

You know, it always amused me that Charles Band was willing to have “Based on an original idea by Charles Band” inserted into the credits on the Full Moon movies, since ideas really aren’t creditable in Hollywood.

But this one really made me laugh, since it should have read “Based on an original idea by Stan Lee.”

Jeffrey Combs is Doctor Anton Mordrid, a supreme sorcerer from another dimension assigned here to earth for the last hundred years by the Monitor (a pair of blue eyes shown against a starry background) to guard against the Death’s Head — also known as Kabal (Brian Thompson), a fellow sorcerer who turned to the Dark Side and was imprisoned by Mordrid eons past.

Well, wouldn’t ya know it, it’s present-day New York, where Mordrid also doubles as the owner of a classy brownstone apartment building and also gives academic lectures on demonology and the supernatural. (His apartment is my Dark Side dream.) Monitoring the world’s news on his nine-screen TV setup, he starts noticing the thefts of various alchemical substances around the world: platinum, diamonds, etc. He immediately concludes that Kabal has broken free from his otherworldly prison; a quick visit to the other side (a cool island floating in the ether) confirms this — Kabal is on earth, and is assembling the alchemical spell to release the Hellspawn still imprisoned, who will then run amuck on earth.

Enter the nosy neighbor and perfunctory love interest, Samantha (Yvette Nipar). As coincidence would have it, Sam’s a special police researcher into the occult (wow! what’re the odds?), who sees Mordrid both in the apartment building and lecturing to assembled interesting parties about occult motivations in criminal activity. He even lets her into his sanctum for some coffee, and so starts to realize something big is up when she sees a sigil from Mordrid’s medallion reproduced on a bloodless corpse’s forehead.

What we’re dealing with here is not just a Full Moon movie; it’s a damned Full Moon movie. The script is from C. Courtney Joyner, who also wrote and directed Trancers 3 and The Lurking Fear, both incredibly unenjoyable movies with piss-poor scripts. Joyner is not the director in this case, though; handling those chores are the father and son team of Albert and Charles Band themselves.

What this gives us is a story that relies so much on scriptwriter convenience as to be scarcely credible. Mordrid first reveals the “time-freezing” qualities of his medallion when he uses it on Samantha in the hallway for no particular reason except to establish to the audience what it can do. Samantha then discovers that he’s the super-secret building owner by discovering her rent check sitting on his front table when he invites her in. All of Kabal’s thefts and other crimes are done in such a theatrical fashion as to be picked up by World In A Minute, for the sole purpose of giving Mordrid a clue to cling to. And the police…

Jeez, the police. I’ve been reading a lot of police procedurals lately, and the downside to that is that my tolerance for unrealistic “movie cop” actions is getting really low. In this case, Sam’s cop friends also discover that Mordrid has a medallion with the same symbol as on the dead girl’s head — so they immediately haul him in in handcuffs and charge him with Murder One! I mean, I’m trying to imagine the D.A. so insane that he wouldn’t just laugh himself silly at the inept police work (unless of course Mordrid brought a fully-justified suit against the police department; then he’d stop laughing really fast). These are, of course, the same police who only send one car in pursuit when said murder “suspect” kidnaps Sam and gets away through Central Park on foot.

All of the above are writer’s sins. But the Bands have their own demerits, largest of which is in their direction of Combs. Through no fault of his own, Combs has never spent much time as a leading man; his roles tend to those of the heavy or the quirky sidekick. Here, playing the heroic lead, poor Combs is completely adrift with what to do with his role, and apparently he got no helpful advice from either director; he ends up behaving like the class wallflower who finally got himself a date and doesn’t know how to behave.

Given the problems here, it’s surprising that the movie is as good as it is (not that it’s good, but it could have been a lot worse). Most of that owes to the comic-bookiness of it all, which can simply be attributed that the entire feel and presentation owes tons to Marvel’s Doctor Strange comic. I mean, any movie which has the audacity to open with a shot of a small blue-clad sorceror getting his orders from a pair of blue eyes superimposed on a star field has the chutzpah to push through a lot.

All the same, I’m not surprised that the Doctor Mordrid 2 suggested in the VideoZone segment afterward didn’t come to pass.

(Incidentally, the VideoZone also announced two then-upcoming features for Full Moon: The Lurking Fear and The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Now, the original story “The Lurking Fear” is about the most cinematic of all of Lovecraft’s stories, and I was simply appalled about how they threw out absolutely all of the good stuff in bringing it to the big screen [again, courtesy of the talentless Joyner]; so I’m actually very relieved that Innsmouth didn’t ever get made to suffer the same fate.)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 2
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 3
• sorely-abused paleantological specimens: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
  • Guest of Honor Jeffrey Combs is obviously a regular in the ST universe, with two recurring roles (Weyoun and Brunt the Ferengi, including one episode in which he was both) plus two other guest shots on DS9, and a guest role on Voyager
  • Brian Thompson (Kabal) was the Klingon helmsman in Star Trek: Generations, plus two guest shots on DS9 and one (as a Klingon) on TNG
  • Jeff Austin (Detective Levitz) had small parts on both DS9 and Voyager