Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Written and directed by Brett Piper
• Starring
  • Georgia Hatzis
  • Alexandra Boylan
  • Ethan Krasnoo
  • Samara Doucette
  • Steven Bornstein

After my positive reviews of The Return of Captain Sinbad and They Bite, Steven Williams and Brett Piper of Kinetic Image Co. Ltd. volunteered a screener of the new movie they just completed, Drainiac!, which will be distributed by Rounds Entertainment. I’m always delighted to see anything by Kinetic Image. These guys are true independents, making films that corporate crank-em-out factories never would. Their movies are consistently watchable and frequently terrific, especially when you consider the paper-route budget on which they’re made. I wish I could give Drainiac! as enthusiastic and unmitigated a thumbs-up as I did for They Bite, but even with major flaws, this is a still a video worth checking out.

First, a prologue: Two homeless men wander in the woods and find an old house at night. They enter the basement for shelter — and promptly get attacked by green slime from the piping. End prologue.

Julie’s a seventeen-year-old with a pissy life. Her mom killed herself a year ago, apparently to get away from Julie’s dad, and we really can’t blame her; he’s a cruel, loveless SOB who takes every occasion to belittle Julie and denigrate her. He also works her like a slave in his “money-making” projects, in which he buys derelict houses and tries to sell them.

Now, Julie’s already messed up — she has bad dreams constantly, probably stemming from Mom’s death — and the last thing she wants is for her dad to leave her at the spooky old house way out on Miskatonic Road on a Saturday while he goes back into town for “important business” (i.e., he’s going to go drink for about four hours). The house sets her on edge; the piping works erratically, spitting out various types of goo. And other things are strange; when she spills a bucket of water, it scurries away into the corner, leaving no trace. And she starts seeing things, creatures like in her dreams…

Her friends (two girls and a guy) come to help her, but they’re not really much help — especially since Wade, the bastard that everyone hates, tags along and first tries to terrify Julie to death, and then tries to rape one of the other girls. (Gratifyingly, he soon gets his comeuppance. A word of warning: Don’t take a leak in a house with possessed piping if you want to hold on to your wedding tackle.)

Finally sensing that there’s more to this house than delusions on Julie’s part, the friends decide to leave, when the car is suddenly swallowed by an Instant Bog, which leaves nothing but the antenna sticking above dry-again ground. (Boy, that was my favorite spell in AD&D.)

All looks bad until the mysterious grizzled ghost hunter Plummer shows up out of nowhere and announces that they have to do an exorcism…

Like everything from Kinetic Image, this is a marvel of wringing every bit of production value out of a miniscule budget. The house is such a perfect set that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t made to order. Simple tricks like footage shown in reverse are used with surprising effect, and the handpuppet creatures and stop-motion animation (a lost art) blend in well. Acting is always at least passable, and the soundtrack is both adequate and inobtrusive. And the miniature work is fantastic.

My biggest complaint (and please understand that this isn’t as derogatory as it first sounds) is that this is a movie that someone else could have made, most notably Full Moon. I mean, think about it; for the last five years, Charles Band’s been making most of his movies around the formula of a group of hip young people trapped in a castle/hospital/cemetery/what have you as they get picked off. (Granted, we’re missing the obligatory black person, but we do have the neo-sixties chick.) The concept — “A house with haunted plumbing” — sounds like it could have been “an original idea by Charles Band,” and we even have showing up in the last reel a creature whose original design could have become one of Full Moon’s action figures.

And when considered on this basis, Drainiac! shows up as lacking in the technical department. Remember, Charlie Band runs a video product factory, and no matter the story content of his flicks, they’re always smooth. In contrast, Drainiac! shows many of the shortcomings of independent filmmaking; inconsistent film stock, some rough editing, and a few scenes with patchy sound. (There may have been a final remastering after the making of the screener copy I got, in which case these comments are obviously invalid.) While the script certainly isn’t as depressingly automated as those by Benjamin Carr (who I now believe is actually a set of cut-rate scriptwriting software), it doesn’t have enough of that rule-breaking enthusiasm that would lift this movie out of Full Moon’s court and into its own category.

So my final words to the Kinetic Image fellas: It’s a good piece of work, and I know you wanted to make a haunted house movie, but it’s counter-productive to make a movie that someone else could make with better commercial results. Keep making those movies, like They Bite, that no one else in their right minds would make. And keep making them fun.

(And whatever you do, find another excuse to use that creepy-ass New Hampshire house again.)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5
• breasts: 4
• explosions: 3
• dream sequences: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
• gratuitous Lovecraft references: 1