Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Bob Keen
• Written by Vlady Pildysh and Warren P. Sonoda
• Starring
  • Meredith Henderson
  • James Binkley
  • Nathan Stephenson
  • Laura De Carteret
  • Robert Englund

Here’s a nifty idea for a movie. There’s an older lawman, see, who’s captured a notorious occult serial killer. And he gets convicted and all that, and they take him to the electric chair, and the lawman breathes a sigh of relief, because this killer’s finally dead, right? But, see, the killer’s got supernatural powers, so he comes back — Oh, you’ve heard this one before?

Heartstopper is only one of the most recent movies to reuse one of the hoariest old cliches of the genre, The Killer Who Comes Back To Torment The Lawman Who Caught Him. (It’s second only to that old standard, The Dumbass Teens Who Think That Partying In The Abandoned House On The Edge Of Town Is A Good Idea.) I don’t want to dismiss Heartstopper completely at the outset, as the director and screenwriters do attempt to bring a few new details to the plotline, if by “new” we mean “transplanted from other movies.” (The screenwriting circumstances were apparently more complex than the credits above, as listed during the opening crawl, would indicate: The back of the DVD box reads, “Story: Vlady Pildysh; Screenplay: Vlady Pildysh; Screenplay Re-Write: Warren P. Sonoda.”) But this field has simply been plowed too many times; the soil’s played out.

“Boogah.”

The lawman in question, Sheriff Berger, is played by Robert Englund (ooh, what a reversal). The killer is Jonathan Chambers (James Binkley), a standard-issue occultist murderer: He’s big and balding and impassive, he rips the still-beating hearts from the chests of his victims with his bare hands, and he quotes random ominous Bible verses and says things like, “You know nothing of eternal pain.” The night is dark and stormy, and thanks to a lightning strike, the electric chair thinks it’s part of an Independence Day celebration instead of a means of capital punishment. Nevertheless, Chambers is declared dead at the scene, and Sheriff Berger breathes a sigh of relief.

Meanwhile, there’s a teenaged girl named Sara (Meredith Henderson) who’s completely bummed out by high school and the bitchy “popular squad” who go to great lengths to accuse her of being a slut in front of all her peers. Sara chooses this dark and stormy night to end it all, but (since this was shot in Canada, where handguns are few and far between), she tries to do so by kneeling down on the road, her back to oncoming traffic. In this case, though, the oncoming traffic is Sheriff Berger in his car with Dr. Hitchens (Michael Cram), who’s going to perform Chambers’ autopsy,and right behind them is the ambulance transporting Chambers’ Kentucky-fried carcass to the hospital. (I thought I heard somewhere that they don’t really ever transport corpses in ambulances, but that may have been a local restriction — and again, given the Canadian shooting location, we could be dealing with any jurisdiction in two countries.) Berger clips her well enough to break her leg and dislocate her shoulder, and the pain of popping her shoulder back in knocks her right out. So they load her into the back of the half-occupied ambulance for the rest of the trip to the hospital.

“You know, nobody calls me the ‘man of their dreams’ anymore.”

The rest of the movie takes place in the hospital, and it’s just the perfect place for nefarious goings-on on a stormy night; two days away from being closed down, most of it’s already empty, with a simple skeleton crew manning the ER. Sara ends up in the recovery ward with a cast, under the watchful eye of professional and firm Nurse Grafton (Laura De Carteret). Dr. Hitchens and Chambers’ corpse end up in the autopsy room, where we find out that being toasted by a capricious electrical discharge makes your face look like sculpted latex. But Chambers soon takes care of that; he sits up mid-examination, punches Hitchens’ heart out of his chest, and absorbs the energy or lifeforce or whatever from it, so that he ends up looking pretty much like normal.

Chambers spends most of the rest of the movie trying to grab ahold of Sara, because evidently he realized in their time together in the ambulance that she’s a “one in a million” into whom he could transfer his soul with his dark powers, thus prolonging his reign of terror. Along the way, naturally, he massacres the remaining hospital staff with reckless abandon, and a surprising amount of blood for a domestically-made DVD premiere movie (released without rating to video stores, surprisingly). Of course, if your undead serial killer’s main method of dispatch is pulling hearts out of chests, you know we’re going to be hip-deep in the red stuff pretty soon.

Little-known fact: A botched electrocution can turn you into a human tiki.

Sara, meanwhile, wants to get out of the hospital anyway, and her mother (Lori Hallier) won’t check her out until morning, mainly because she’s a bitch. (Though it must be said, not the “I’ll a ferociously over-the-top bad parent” bitch; more of a “here, come a little closer so I can slap you a few times” bitch.) So she engages the services of Walter (Nathan Stephenson), a passing acquaintance from school brought in because of multiple stab wounds in his side, and the two of them try to hobble and wheelchair themselves out as the situation in the hospital gets progressively worse.

As I mentioned, there are a few novelties thrown into the mix. For example, Chambers knows that Sara is somewhere in this almost-empty hospital, so instead of wandering the halls looking for her, he first chains the doors to keep her confined. And Sheriff Berger doesn’t emerge as the hero — in fact, he dies at Chambers’ hands not long after realizing that his old nemesis is alive again. (Nathan’s First Rule of Spoilers: “Anything they tell you on the back of the DVD case is fair game.”)

“At least you pulled out on of my organs that I can identify on sight.”

But there are too many shopworn elements stitched together to maintain the illusion of novelty for the whole production. Chambers is such a generic character they could sell him at Wal-Mart. The entire main action of the movie, our two heroes sneaking around the hospital, assumes that the viewing audience has never seen Halloween 2 (1981), from which it was lifted wholesale. Our teen protagonists are supposed to be edgy and with it, of course — as signified by the solitary occurence of the word “owned” in their dialogue, which otherwise resembles nothing I’ve ever heard from a teenager in either diction or attitude. Punctuating the above are the bits that simply make no sense. Why does Chambers take to pushing a gurney all over the hospital as he hunts Sara down? As far as I could tell, it’s simply because the one creaking wheel is all spooky ‘n’ ominous ‘n’ such.

On the technical side, there some continuity problems so glaring they’re practically outlined in neon, and most of them involve blood. If you script calls for your heroine to wear a tight white skirt and then lie face-down on a bloody floor, you’d better allow for some consistency in the placement of the blood splotches across her torso for the rest of the movie. And though we’re told repeatedly that Walter is in danger of bleeding to death from his burst stitches, it’s hard to take that danger seriously when the bloody shirt across his abdomen never looks wet.

He’s a level-headed black guy. She’s a neurotic white chick. Together, they fight crime!

And even if you’re an extremely forgiving viewer, willing to overlook all of the above, the ending will still insult your intelligence, as it’s an out-of-the-blue salvation that is as close to a deus ex machina as you’re likely to get in 21st-century cinema.

Even accounting for general professionalism in the production, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done better before somewhere else, and there’s little that doesn’t remind you clearly of where you’ve previously seen it. There’s simply no more entertainment to be wrung from the cliches hauled out for use once again here.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 15
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 4
• dream sequences: 1 (a double-waker, even)
• ominous thunderstorms: 1, which lasts all frickin’ night
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Lori Hallier (”Ms. Wexler,” Sara’s mother) played “Dr. Riley Frazier” on the Voyager episode “Unity”