Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Stuart Gordon
• Written by Steven Feinberg, Terry Curtis Fox, and David Venable
• Starring
  • Christopher Lambert
  • Kurtwood Smith
  • Loryn Locklin
  • Lincoln Kilpatrick
  • Jeffrey Combs

Another Jeffrey Combs movie, another futuristic prison. (Fortunately, I don’t think there are any more in his filmography.)

This comes to us from director Stuart Gordon, to whom the phrase “wildly uneven” applies perfectly. Gordon has given the horror genre some of its recent classics, including Reanimator, From Beyond, The Pit and the Pendulum, and Castle Freak; but when turning his hand to sci-fi, it seems like he’s relenquished the director’s chair to his evil twin, inflicting the likes of Robot Jox upon us. Thus, it’s wonderful to see Gordon give us a science fiction film which works, classic or not.

In a fairly near future, ex-Captain John Brennick (Christopher Lambert) and his wife (and former soldier) Karen (Loryn Locklin, best known as the perky minivan lady) are trying desperately to cross the border into Canada, because Karen is pregnant for a second time — a no-no, even though their first child died at birth. Caught, John sacrifices himself to the police to give Karen a chance to get across the bridge. This gives him the only happiness he can hold to as he is sentenced to 31 years incarceration — in the Fortress. He is now effectively the property of the MenTel Corporation.

It’s a big-ass underground prison, 33 stories deep, and as added insurance and control, the prisoners are outfitted with Intestinators — little devices the size of an egg yolk forcibly inserted down their throats into their abdomens, with which the central computer can zap them. (Oddly enough, we are first shown the “pain” penalty for crossing yellow-lined zones, and “death” for entering red-lined zones. Then, for the rest of the movie, there isn’t a single yellow- or red-lined zone. Must have been an object lesson; I pity the poor claustrophobic prisoner who decided to demonstrate it for his comrades.)

Brennick soon meets his bunkmates: there’s Gomez (Clifton Collins Jr. who entered with Brennick), myopic computer geek D-Day (Jeffrey Combs), shaven-head bad-ass Stiggs (Tom Towles, from Henry and the remade Night of the Living Dead), and steward Abraham (Lincoln Kilpatrick). The five of them are crowded into a two-bunk cell with a laser perimeter, guarded by a roving computer eye which can also monitor and interrupt your dreams (a fact Brennick finds out the first night).

Brennick’s just fine with this — fine with standing up to bully Stiggs and his psycho friend Maddox, fine with defending diminutive Gomez from Maddox’s attempted rape, fine with with visiting Prison Director Poe (Kurtwood Smith, currently a regular on That ’70s Show) about the resulting altercation — but everything becomes very not fine, very quickly, when Poe shows him that Karen has not escaped after all; she’s incarcerated in the women’s section of the Fortress. And her baby, when it’s born, will be the property of the MenTel Corporation.

Naturally, Brennick is going to try to escape.

It’s a good little film, kept very interesting by a multitude of plot twists: Director Poe, a nasty little voyeur hanging on to what little shreds of humanity he has, takes a fancy to Karen and has her move into his apartments, not for sex, but for companionship. Her presence here is the only thing that saves Brennick when, after a deadly fight with Maddox, he’s sent to the Mind Wipe chamber, where a huge gyroscope and brain control drives him mad.

There are fights, escapes, bio-engineered soldiers, revelations as to the fate of appropriated babies (hint: Director Poe ain’t exactly normal), the requisite ingenious prison break, and just about the most difficult delivery I’ve ever seen.

The beauty of this movie is that it’s not terribly ambitious; Gordon knew that it was not meant to be this generations’s defining science fiction film, and so instead had fun with it. The characters are colorful and engaging, and the actors are b-movie all-stars; the story moves along at a fair clip; and the prison itself is a novel setting, with plenty of inconsistencies in future technology but none that sit up and insist that you notice them.

In fact, the quality of this movie was brought home to me by recently viewing Fortress 2, now on the new release shelves. In the sequel, pale imitations of the setting and director are placed before us, without the whole husband-wife devotion thing that is a big draw in the original.

Hey, I don’t know if it’s art, but it’s fun.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 21
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 2
• dream sequences: 4
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• 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
  • Kurtwood Smith (Poe) was Federation President (under a long white hairpiece) in Star Trek 6, also playing Annorax on the Voyager two-parter “Year in Hell,” plus a guest shot on DS9
  • Tom Towles (Stiggs) had guest shots on both Voyager and DS9 (the latter as a Klingon)