Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Produced and directed by Charles Band
• Written by Craig Hamann
• Starring
  • Tim Thomerson
  • Melissa Behr
  • Tracy Scoggins
  • Phil Fondacaro

I don’t know if it serves as a credit to my forgiving nature or as a blemish upon my ability to honestly judge crap, but I can’t quite bring myself to give this pitiful excuse for a movie a Breaker rating. That shameful brand must be reserved for movies or such abysmal incompetence that it either excites my full powers of fist-shaking derision or starts me hooting like a gleeful extra from Beneath the Planet of the Apes. This one did neither; it just stubbornly, stolidly, sullenly refused to work on any level at all. However, given that I’ve seen and reviewed all three (!) movies to which it is a sequel, I couldn’t help but review it.

If this review seems a little terse and less lengthy than normal, there’s a good reason: it mimics the movie, which, with padding and reused footage galore, still only manages to limp across the finish line with 60 minutes between “And now, our Feature Presentation” and the start of the closing credits (or, if you prefer to count the credits’ running time, a whopping 64 minutes). Even by Full Moon standards, this is a pathetic showing.

Here’s the setup. Tim Thomerson reprises his role as Brick Bardo, hard-boiled cop from another world from Dollman, a movie I genuinely detested (I’ve been meaning to write a longer and more detailed review of it to replace the inadequate present one, but I can’t quite bring myself to inflict it on my VCR again). Stranded on earth, where the difference in scale leaves him twelve inches tall, his ears perk up when he hears of the lone girl who was not unshrunk at the end of Bad Channels. Hey, they’re the only two people of similar size in the world; they’ll pretty much have to turn to each other for companionship, right?

Meanwhile, we’re treated to footage swiped from Demonic Toys (pad pad pad pad) to introduce us back into that storyline: Policewoman Judith Grey (Tracy Scoggins) is still obsessed with the toys in the warehouse, and while she’s on unauthorized stakeout one night, a bum gets into the warehouse, plays around on a tricycle, and promptly falls over. Apparently he had a paper-mache skull, because that negligible impact causes blood to positively gush out of him — I mean, it looks like someone left the water on in the kitchen when they left on vacation. And if you saw Demonic Toys, you know that blood will reawaken the demon that’s gotten trapped in the plot of land under the warehouse. Ta-dah — the murderous toys from the first movie instantly reappear! (Instead of, say, animating any of the toys just lying around all over the place.) Well, they almost reappear; we witness the return of Baby Oopsy-Daisie, the Jack-in-the-Box, and the laser-firing robot. But instead of the savage teddy bear, we instead get a murderous G.I. Joe-type action figure.

Judith comes in, guns blazing, to blow the toys away again, but gets caught by the new security guard (Phil Fondacaro!) and the police, who relieve her of her badge and drag her off. But once the cops are gone, the toys reveal themselves to Fondacaro and win him instantly to helping their side (and I can’t make a single comment suggesting that they appealed to him because of similar size, for fear of sounding like I’m making fun of little people, dammit). And just in case you’ve forgotten it from the last movie… Judith is a really crummy cop.

Okay. Meanwhile, we get reacquainted with our shrunken girl, living an idyllic life in a kitchen drawer. And to get through the rest of the movie, you have to accept the idea that she can competently live alone, without anyone to get her on or off the counter. (she even complains at one point, that there’s no one to get her down.) And that the media leaves her alone, except for one paparazzi who photographs her through her open window. Oh, and you also have to accept the fact the girl here is actually Nurse Ginger (Melissa Behr), even though at the end of Bad Channels it was clearly Bunnie, World’s Most Annoying Cheerleader, who didn’t get unshrunk. (It only takes some creative redubbing of the footage included from Bad Channels to change that stickling little bit of continuity.) To be honest, I can’t fault that “creative” decision; the idea of being stuck with Bunnie as the entire pool of eligible females would be enough to make even Dollman swear celibacy. Remember that old joke about “Even if you were the last woman on earth”? yeah.

So Brick Bardo arrives just in time to save Ginger from a spider, and they have a tepid get-acquainted scene which naturally includes footage recapping Dollman in its entirety to explain Bardo’s current circumstances, as well as a goodly selection of Bad Channels footage as Ginger also tells her story (pad pad pad pad pad). And since they’re quite obviously the only people for each other, we go from there to a love scene.. which is promptly interrupted by Judith, who’s finagled the info on Ginger’s whereabouts from the paparazzi guy. (That’s okay, though; I’ve never really wanted to see what exactly Barbie and Ken do in the beach house.)

Judith then sells Bardo on the idea of helping her attack the toys, since they use the air ducts to move around in; Dollman’s the perfect size to fight them on their own scale. Ginger gets all huffy and protective (a natural consequence of mini-coitus interruptus, I suppose), and holy smokes, it’s right here that I realize that we’ve already wasted 36 minutes of our running time. You gotta be kidding me.

Nope, no joke. We’ve padded ourselves right out of storyline. Judith transports Bardo and Ginger (who insisted on coming along, natch) to the warehouse in a valise and looses them inside; she promptly gets herself taken out by the laser-shooting robot, which then finds itself on the receiving end of Bardo’s souped-up pistol. We’re then treated to a dull sequence of little people chasing each other between oversized boxes and through air ducts, which Ginger being just about as much help as any civilian is who insists on tagging along with the cops in the movies, i.e., she screams a lot and runs away and generally makes a perfect hostage. And Bardo contrives to get his nifty returns-to-his-palm gun stuck under a packing crate, leaving him to fight the toys with toy-sized props, which just happen to be exactly the right scale for him (such as a hockey stick).

It’s right about here that I realized why the teddy bear was replaced with Mr. Spooky G.I. Joe; it’s a lot easier to put a guy in a G.I. Joe suit and mask and have him fight Bardo at the right scale. The same cannot be said for Baby Oopsy-Daisie and the Jack-in-the-Box, who alternate between the real-scale puppets (which are none the better for wear after having made it through this second movie, it must be said) and oversized props animated by several people, which bear very little resemblance to the puppet versions.

Baby Oopsy-Daisie’s plan (which he explains in detail while Bardo’s tied up in a classic comic-book deathtrap situation) is to be possessed by their master demon at the stroke of midnight (hey, did anyone bother to mention before this point that tonight was Halloween? No, they did not), at which point the toy will rape Ginger and create a body for the master to inhabit. (And yes, we do get to see that flashback scene from Demonic Toys again of how the demon’s last attempt at corporeal existence went awry.) Does this mean that the demon will be stuck in a scaled-down body? Is that really better than his current existence? How well would this possess-and-rape plan have worked if a miniature babe hadn’t fortuitously stumbled into the warehouse on exactly the right night? It doesn’t pay to think about these things, believe me; I can tell that no one involved with the production did.

And I don’t want to ruin the denouement for you, but I’ll just say this: It’s a no-brainer when the bad guys tell the good guy to drop his gun, if we already know that the good guy can make his gun leap back into his hand at will…

The end. Sixty minutes, and what have we seen? No more than thirty or forty minutes of original footage, a tragic underuse of Tim Thomerson’s comedic talents (whose idea was for him to play it all completely straight?), and a completely forgettable experience all around. The good side, though, is that a single movie managed to nail the coffins shut on three separate mediocre franchises. That’s gotta be a record.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5 (thanks in large part to reused footage)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 8 (again, thanks largely to reused footage)
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Tracy Scoggins (Judith) played Cardassian Gilora Rejal in the DS9 episode “Destiny”