Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer (and Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, uncredited)
• Written by Mortimer Braus
• Starring
  • Victor Mature
  • Rita Gam
  • Gabriele Ferzetti
  • Milly Vitale
  • Rik Battaglia
• Produced by Ottavio Poggi

If you’re mostly ignorant of Roman history like I am, you know Hannibal for one thing: crossing the Alps with elephants to fight Rome. (He lost.) I don’t know how well the plot of this movie adheres to the facts (even the back of the VCI Entertainment DVD case calls it “a fanciful adaptation of history”); I do know that Warner Brothers, trying to earn the returns of an historical epic while cutting corners like a sword-and-sandal movie, hired B-movie director Edgar G. Ulmer to work with producers in Italy in order to squeeze their dollars. It might have worked, too, if not for the script.

Just to let you know that you’re watching a movie about the famous Carthaginian general, not the famous bon vivant cannibal, we start with a voiceover that baldly spells out the situation for us: Rome has made aggressive moves toward Carthage, so in retaliation Hannibal has decided on a pre-emptive strike, moving his army of 40,000 men (and some elephants!) over the treacherous Alps. There’s a minute of the Roman Senate doing what they do best in response (i.e., talking at each other), and then there they are – thousands of cheap Italian extras, making their way single file over the icy slopes. This lasts for for a full ten minutes: men climb, officers shout, “Keep moving,” and occasionally soldiers slip and fall while doing their best approximation of the Wilhelm scream. Intercut with this location footages are shots of elephants on a soundstage, walking through shaving scream past styrofoam rocks; we also get shots of Hannibal (Victor Mature), also on a soundstage, silently watching the army supposedly go buy. Not the most captivating beginning for a movie.

40,000 men in single file? Dude, the Visigoths’ll get there first.

We have to wade through another ten minutes of historical this’n’thats (rations are almost gone, but the Roman ally Plutarius who guards the Roman side of the Alps switches allegiance, but there are only half of the 40,000-man Carthaginian army left, but hey! We got elephants!) before we can safely say that we’ve started in on the real story. Near where they’ve come down from the Alps is the country villa of powerful Senator Fabius (Gabriele Ferzetti). He’s in Rome, of course, endlessly discussing what to do about Hannibal, but his son Quintilius (Mario Girotti — or as you might know him better, Terence Hill) and niece Sylvia (Rita Gam) are at the villa, and one of their slaves betrays their presence to Hannibal in exchange for his freedom. Hannibal captures them at first to be hostages, but changes his plans for two reasons: 1) he needs to wage psychological warfare on Rome, so he has extra campfires lit for soldiers he doesn’t have, just so his captives will be able to report his army as being three times the size it really is; and 2) Sylvia is, y’know, hawt. (They cute-meet when Sylvia, not knowing that he’s Hannibal, goes on and on about what a brute the Carthaginian is. It’s a Roman rom-com!)

“Well, hello there. Would you like to see my fierce elephant?”

Sylvia takes back both the message of Hannibal’s army size and his wish for peace to Rome, but no one listens to her. Then her Uncle Fabius tells the Senate that they ought to tire Hannibal out with skirmishes until some distant legions can get back to Rome, but no one listens to him. Then Hannibal complains that his eye hurts, and within two minutes it’s been plucked out and covered with a dashing eyepatch. Then I got up to get some apple juice from the fridge, but we were all out. Isn’t it all so exciting?

Aaagh! Heffalumps!

As is the Hollywood standard, a single meeting between citizens of warring countries is enough to engender a passionate love, so Hannibal and Sylvia get drawn back together… then apart… then there are some battles. The elephants (which are Indian elephants, even though the historical Hannibal was from North Africa, and smallish ones at that) lumber into the fray, proving that their main advantage is that they just can’t be hit by enemy arrows. And even the elephant jockeys perched on top are more-or-less immune, despite standing out as a target. We’re not talking The Return of the King here; the elephants are even less impressive because, except in some few scenes with the elephants walking, they’re still kept on soundstages for control, and you can’t have humongous crowd scenes on an indoor set.

“Like it? Oh, darling, I think your hat’s positively divine!”

Honestly, I couldn’t tell what story was being told here. Hannibal’s attempted conquest of Rome? The movie starts halfway through that story, spends the first ten minutes on the part that everyone knows, throws pretty but disconnected battles at us, and ends with the campaign still continuing, though in doubt. Hannibal and Sylvia’s love? They don’t meet until a good chunk of the movie has gone by, and then they fizzle because Sylvia finds out about Hannibal’s son and his (I assume) ex-wife, who appear out of nowhere ten minutes from the end. Hannibal can’t decide which is the main plot and which is the subplot, and as a consequence, neither seems worthy of the limelight. If the story (either one) were compelling, we could overlook the sometimes stilted fight choreography, the incessant switching between location and soundstage (it’s like watching an entire season of Bonanza in one sitting), and the fact that the elephants are only slightly more integral to this movie than the ninjas in a Godfrey Ho ninja movie.

Fabius, enlisting the Senate to help him look for Kyle.

At least Victor Mature looks like he’s having fun. At age forty-seven when this movie was shot, he was starting to look his age, but he still exhibits a joie de vivre every time an elephant routs a Roman or someone challenges him to a duel. Given that almost all the other actors are dubbed-over Italians whose performance is about as convincing as that of the elephants, he certainly stands out. The rest of the movie, despite the spectacle, is fairly forgettable.

A Notable Quotable:

Quintilius: “Sylvia, I love you.”
Sylvia: “Quintilius, please try to make sense.”

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: I got to 28 before I lost count in the big battle scene
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0