Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Ed Winfield
• Written by Dominic Biondi
• Starring
  • Kellan Lutz
  • Marnette Patterson
  • Mandy Amano
  • Scott Whyte
  • Richard Chance
• Produced by Debra Isaacs
• Executive produced by Nick Calcarone and Brian O.W. McMahon

Ghosts of Goldfield begins with those terribly ominous words, “Based on true events.” That usually means that the filmmakers are preemptively excusing their deficiencies in originality, story coherence, etc., by claiming that they were hampered by the facts. Beyond a few simple historical facts, I can neither confirm nor deny the factual basis of any part of the story presented, but I can say this: If a movie sucks, it sucks, and one can’t use the facts as a defense.

Here’s some background: Goldfield, Nevada was a real-life boomtown after gold was discovered in 1902. Like most boomtowns, it crested and crashed in short order, from a high of 30,000 in 1906 to under 5,000 in 1910; the largest mining company left in 1919. The nadir was in 1950, when the population scraped 275. According to the 2000 census, population has since bloated to 440, and though the majority of the buildings are empty, they are not abandoned; everything in town is owned, and some historic structures have been renovated to become “ghost town” tourist attractions.

Oh, Blair Witch, what hast thou wrought?

So much for the facts. Now we have the fancy.

In what has become one of the hoariest cliches of the past ten years, our protagonists are a group/team/concatenation of student filmmakers, off to document the reputedly spectral goings-on in the Goldfield Hotel, now out of service. To wit:

- Julie (Marnette Patterson), the psychology major spearheading the project for her dissertation. Her grandmother was once a maid in the hotel, which is why she knows about the haunting.

- Mike (Richard Chance), Julie’s jackass boyfriend who’s along for no good reason. He loves to jump out and scare people, speaks without thinking 100% of the time, and can seemingly pull bottles of hard liquor out of thin air.

“Perhaps we can frighten away the ghosts of so many years ago with a little illumination!”

- Chad (Kellan Lutz, Emmett Cullen from the Twilight movies), cameraman. He’s intelligent, thoughtful, and well-spoken. Naturally, Julie doesn’t notice he exists until after Mike bites it. (Oh, yeah – spoiler alert!)

- Dean (Scott Whyte), sound man. He’s got floppy hair and glasses, so he’s naturally uptight – far too uptight to be realistically paired with…

- Keri (half-Japanese Mandy Amano), whiny social butterfly who’s apparently never before been anywhere without sidewalks.

On their way to Goldfield, they decide to take a shortcut across the desert, where their SUV mysteriously conks out. (“Mysteriously” as in, “it makes no difference to the plot, so why was this included?”) While trudging the last few miles to Goldfield after dark, they stop at a frontier cemetery they find, and Julie starts having psychic flashes of events that happened in the Hotel, events that led up to the legendary haunting. She does not act as if this is anything out of the ordinary.

Rowdy Roddy Piper: The only man who can get in a staring contest with Chuck Norris and walk away with both eyeballs intact.

On finally reaching Goldfield (so why did we bother having the breakdown and everything?), Julie leads them to the bar, which is apparently the only commercial establishment still operating, to meet the bartender who is also the caretaker of the Hotel. This is the high point of the movie for me. Why? Because the gruff, toothpick-chewing bartender is none other than Rowdy Roddy Piper, paragon of masculinity! He’s obviously gotten older since a spate of direct-to-video action flicks put him on the B-movie map in the ‘90s, but he’s still got the spurs to stare down the three wimpy guys in the filmmaking party. Dismayed that there’s no functioning motel in town, Julie persuades him to give her the keys to the Goldfield Hotel now and let them stay the night.

It’s only after another fifteen minutes of creeping around the Hotel trying to find the fusebox and seeing things out of the corner of their eyes that Julie gets around to filling everyone else in on the particulars of the haunting. Seems like they’d want to know all that before they drove out into the middle of Nevada, but I’ll admit that I don’t understand kids these days. The hospital was built by a mining magnate named Winfield (historically it’s Wingfield, but maybe director Ed Winfield felt it was too good an opportunity not to take license with it) who fell in love with the maid Elizabeth (Ashly Rae). Elizabeth became pregnant, and Winfield found out that the baby wasn’t actually his; the father was hotel bartender Jackson Smith (Roddy Piper again, wearing the worst pair of fake sideburns this side of a grade school play). In revenge, Winfield tortured Elizabeth to death in Room 109 and threw the baby down the mineshaft under the hotel (which seems like a really poor place to build a four-story brick structure). Since then, Elizabeth has supposedly wandered the halls, asking, “Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby?”

Ominous hardware, ooOOooh…

One of the unwritten rules of moviemaking is this: if it makes no sense, it should at least be interesting enough to keep the audience from dwelling on how little sense it makes until after the credits roll. Ghosts of Goldfield does it bass-ackwards. Plenty of time is spent with characters wandering the halls, wondering what that sound was, catching glimpses of a spectral woman in white, and getting on each others’ nerves. Comparatively little time is spent making us care. Little by little, Julie starts to understand that her grandmother may have been a participant in the deadly drama, not just a bystander. Meanwhile, Elizabeth behaves in no way that makes sense save by the metrics of crude plot requirements: first she allows herself only to be seen fleetingly, then she shows herself to people individually, then she possesses Keri for no good reason, then she finally starts killing people (jerks first, naturally). It takes a good hour of running time before the characters realize that they may be in some danger, and they react like Movie People do (running up and down stairs and along ill-lit corridors) rather than as Real People would (getting the hell out). Here’s a little survival tip: When being chased by a murderous ghost, if you find that the glass front doors are locked to prevent your escape, it’s okay to break the glass to get out. Really. Even if it’s historic glass.

To top that off, there are plenty of setups without payoffs. The bartender warns them strongly and obviously not to take anything out of the hotel; Keri, previously established as a klepto (or just a spoiled hot chick with a sense of entitlement – it’s hard to tell the two apart), ignores the warning entirely; so why aren’t there any consequences to Keri’s pilfering of bric-a-brac? (I don’t count her death at the end – whoops, spoiler – as there’s no cause and effect implied; several other people also die, after all.) The bartender is obviously identical to Jackson Barr, as both are played by Piper, but no mention is ever made of the fact; is the bartender an identical descendant, like Julie is to her grandmother? A reincarnation? The same person, kept alive by supernatural means? Amortization of the costliest member of the cast? We never find out. (Piper is also never given a chance to kick anyone’s ass – a criminal misuse, if you ask me.)

Gee, I can see why two men would fight over her.

How does a well-meaning misfire of a movie like this come about? Did no one read the script before financing it? (Was there a script before financing it? Or was it just made up on the set?) From little spectral voiceovers and such, I suspect that someone tried to fix this mess in post-production, but the sad truth is that you can never fix a movie in post-production. I don’t begrudge a performance by or paycheck to Rowdy Roddy Piper, but I can’t believe that a better movie couldn’t be made about a real live western ghost town.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• springloaded Mikes: 2 (only one Mike, actually, but he does it two times)
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0