Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Frederic Dybowski
• Written by Serge Rosenzweig
• Starring
  • Miklos Perlos
  • Ben Campbell
  • Lawrence Bayne
  • Katie Zegers

I don’t think anyone will argue against the thesis that Highlander 2: The Quickening was the sorriest entry in the should-never-have-been-sequelized Highlander franchise. Not only was it simply a stupid movie in its own right, it did horrendous revisionist damage to the premise of the original. Most of the changes seem to have been motivated by a perverse desire to nullify anything tha worked in the first movie and blot out its memory.

But there’s another entry in the pseudo-canon which can almost match Highlander 2 for divergence from the original: the animated TV series. This movie, subtitled “The Adventure Begins,” was cobbled together from several episodes of the French-produced series, and serves as a good introduction to the premise — at least, if you’ve seen the original Highlander and know what they’re referencing.

Great. A rabbit with opposable thumbs.

Several centuries after the “Great Catastrophe” which ended civilization, in a village settlement in the Highlands (of no particular country), lives a redheaded teenaged boy named Quentin Dundee (voice of Miklos Perlos), and his little sister Clyde (yup, that’s her name). Quentin’s an adventurous lad troubled by dreams of a day in his childhood when a mysterious man (riding a mysterious two-legged saurian, not too uncommon in the mutated future) found him playing in the forest and asked him a mysterious question: “Do you know your name, child?”

That question’s about to come up again, because a single Immortal named Kortan terrorizes the few remaining human settlements, raiding them from time to time to capture slaves to work in his gargantuan power plant. (If you think this might lead to a fullblown anti-technological subtext, you’re right.) On this one occasion, his forces venture into the Highlands (of no particular country), to the Dundee village.

Out of the village with his sister at the time of the attack, Quentin rushes back to defend it, but is told instead by his mother that he needs to keep himself safe because of semi-messianic prophecies attached to him. He is not, she says, Quentin Dundee; he is instead Quentin MacLeod, last of the clan MacLeod, and destined to kick Kortan’s ass. Alas, the warning almost comes too late, as one of Kortan’s lieutenant’s leading the charge takes careful aim and chops downward on Quentin with his sword…

“Now that the Marvel Comics villains are all dead, I can keep the whole groovy wardrobe to myself!”

And in two far-off locations, Kortan and the mysterious man both feel a “tremor in the Force”…

Quentin revives from near-certain death and runs off into the woods with his sister in tow, where he runs again into the mysterious man. This time, Quentin knows the answer: “I am Quentin MacLeod!” And I don’t suppose I need to enlighten any longtime Highlander fans that the mysterious man is none other than Ramirez (Ben Campbell), old swashbuckling Immortal, coming to train Quentin to kick some Immortal butt.

See, in the days immediately after the Great Catastrophe, the remaining Immortals came together and made a vow to put aside the quest to be the One in order to help humanity. Only one, Kortan, refused, and Connor MacLeod broke his vow to try and remove Kortan from the picture. Connor, alas, got himself killed — but not before making a prophecy that another Immortal would some day come, another MacLeod, and would hand Kortan’s ass to him.

“My hand is NOT massive, you idiot! It’s just foreshortened!”

The adventures that make up the bulk of the “movie” are largely interruptions to Quentin’s training. First up, Quentin insists on rescuing the Dundees — with his little sister in tow, yet. Then he helps them defend themselves against a group of bandits who’ve gotten their hands on an old weapon of power: a machinegun. (This episode is almost comically anti-gun. Did you know that it was love of the power of a machinegun that led the pre-Catastrophe world into war and ruin? And Quentin is so taken with the destructive power of the machinegun when he gets his hand on it that he almost turns his back on Ramirez and Clyde in a quest to become the fascist ruler of the world.) Then he and Ramirez get shanghaied by another bookish Immortal who’s secretly in league with Kortan, and get lured into an ambush in which Kortan wants to take care of this Quentin problem once and for all.

What’s to like here? Well, for one thing, the backstory of the Highlander mythos is left intact — the Game, the Immortals, etc. Sure, Ramirez is back for no good reason, and in fact the entire climactic ending of the original Highlander is ignored, but every sequel to the original has had to do that to justify its existence.

Listen, Quentin. When it takes a hazmat suit to serve your food…

On the other hand, there are plenty of concessions to the animated series whch make the entire premise of the series seem bizarre. While the backstory of the Immortals isn’t changed, it also isn’t explained. Even the world “Highlander” is used as a title for a particular Immortal, severed of its Scottish heritage.

But assumed knowledge on the part of the audience isn’t the weirdest part of the premise. Think about it: Highlander revolves around mortal combat, culminating in decapitation. The live action TV series could never actually show it, but they indicated indirectly, and they talked about it. You can’t even do that much on a kid’s show, so instead we get scenes in which one Immortal advances on another with a sword drawn… and then we cut to outside the building to see the flash of light, and no one ever explains what just happened.

“Um, I think we’re supposed to act out a scene from the Star Wars trilogy here.”

All of this, and more (such as shoddy animation) could be cited as deficiencies in the series, but here’s the biggie. What made the Highlander franchise resonate with so many people despite the increasingly-flawed attempts to extend the franchise, is the melancholy romanticism of the premise: The invulnerable man whose very immortality keeps him from enjoying the pleasures other men take for granted, at least for very long. There’s none of that here; Quentin’s just old enough to be chafing against the yoke of Ramirez’s tutelage, but not old enough to appreciate the tragic irony of his situation, or taste in its bitterness. Imagine if Highlander: The Series had focused on punk kid Richie instead of Duncan MacLeod, and you’ll begin to understand a bit of the flavor, or lack thereof, in the animated series. This is not a series in which Queen’s “Who Wants to Live Forever?” could ever find a home.

Enough of this seems so obviously to invalidate Highlander as a potential for Saturday morning cartoons that I’m still amazed that the green light was ever given to this series. But then, the entire history of The Franchise That Never Should Have Been is a bewildering and frustrating one. And the very least, there’s no mention of the planet Zeist here.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 6
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 7
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 3 (none of them associated with Quickenings, oddly enough)
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0