Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Written and directed by Neil Burger
• Starring
  • Raymond J. Barry
  • Dylan Haggerty
  • Renee Faia
  • Kelsey Kemper
  • Dennis Lau

Despite my love of conspiracy and mystery in my youth, I never got caught up on the JFK enigma. For one thing, I was living in Canada, so I felt very little connection to it. For another, mysterious motivations never captured my adolescent imagination like outright mysterious happenings; with the Loch Ness monster, UFO’s, Bigfoot, Atlantis and Lemuria, crop circles, etc., to puzzle over, who could be interested in an assassination with “merely” political skullduggery behind it?

Walter Ohlinger, International Man of Mystery.

Be that as it may, Neil Burger here succeeded in captivating me with his cinema verite fake documentary, largely by making the mystery of four decades back the springboard for a more immediate mystery in the present.

It all starts when out-of-work TV cameraman Ron Kobeleski (Dylan Haggerty) is approached by his reserved, elderly neighbor Walter Ohlinger (character actor Raymond J. Barry, here suitably unrecognizable) who wants to confess to a long-past crime on camera for posterity. If you’re going to confess to past misdeeds, better make them worth the while, and Walter does: He declares matter-of-factly that he was the second gunman on the Grassy Knoll. He killed President Kennedy.

The bullet with Kennedy’s name on it. (Or something like that.)

His proof? He still has the bullet casing, kept in a safety deposit box. That, and a will that names names, are what’s kept him alive and protected since the day his old Marine C.O. called him and hired him for the job. Since then, Walter has easily kept mum, feeling no particular remorse; he moved from job to job, his wife left him, and eventually he ended up in Ron’s neighborhood with a case of cancer that gives him maybe five months to live and a long-dormant will to tell his story. After all, as he says, “If you kill the most powerful man in the world, that makes you the most powerful, don’t you think?”

Ron, intrigued, has some preliminary tests done on the bullet casing, which demonstrate that indeed was fired at about the right time to possibly be from The Bullet. Half-convinced despite himself, he starts shooting footage of Walter and his search for something to back him up, becoming an unintentional second character in his own documentary; we see his wife (Renee Faia) and daughter (Kelsey Kemper) shake their heads quizzically as jobless Ron draws on their savings to transport himself and Walter, looking for clues and answers, using both a handheld video camera and a more surreptitious eyeglass-mounted camera to document the quest.

Yeah, I feel SO much safer now.

They visit Dallas, where Walter dispassionately demonstrates exactly where he was and what he did. They seek out one of Walter’s old Marine buddies (Jared McVay) who, while uninvolved with the Kennedy affair, can confirm that he and Walter were both snipers, trained to assassinate Castro, and that their C.O. John Seymour was just the kind of spooky guy who could be involved in shadowy schemes.

And that’s when Walter gets a vaguely-worded message on his machine, cautioning him in hazy terms against doing what he’s doing. And Ron, with growing paranoia, hears a sound in his backyard at night, sees a shadow that shouldn’t be there on his newly-installed security cam. Have they gotten too close to a still-active conspiracy?

“And it shoots the whole room in ‘Ominous Blue,’ too!”

What really makes the movie shine (and despite my best intentions, I suppose some comparisons to The Blair Witch Project are apt) is the ambiguity of it all. We, along with our proxy Ron, begin to accept Walter’s story, and then something comes along which throws the whole scenario into doubt. Ron goes to interview Walter’s tight-lipped ex-wife (Kate Williamson) on his own, and gets out of her only the comment that “Walter was a liar.” Walter and Ron journey back to Maryland to track down John Seymour (Darrell Sandeen) at Bethesda Naval Hospital, but the only thing that he’ll admit is that Walter was in a mental hospital during the timeframe of the JFK assassination. Is Walter really the shooter, whose past has been too well covered to discover, or is he an insane attention seeker?

If there’s a complaint to be made, it’s that some of the dialogue sounds a little too “scripty” to be a convincing faux documentary, especially as compared to the ad-libbed quality of The Blair Witch Project or America’s Deadliest Home Video. I blame that squarely on movies themselves; we’ve grown up hearing people in movies talk like people in movies to the degree that we sometimes forget that people in the real world don’t talk like people in movies.

Never judge a man till you’ve walked down a lot of loooong corridors in his shoes.

But the performances more than make up for it. Raymond Barry carries the movies as the taciturn, introverted Walter, in front of the camera for 97% of the running time; it’s his belieavably flinty demeanor which is the best evidence for the truth of Walter’s story. But just as essential is Dylan Haggerty as the man behind the camera, prompting and enabling Walter’s claims and discoveries and reacting with a believable, uneasy blend of skepticism and paranoia.

The very end overdoes it a little on the conspiratorial overtones, and unlike BWP, the question of who eventually edited the footage together into a coherent feature is never addressed. But it’s still an engaging little film — engaging both to the emotions and to the intellect. See it when you get the chance.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 4 (counting JFK)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Dylan Haggerty (Ron Kobeleski) played “Epran” in the DS9 episode “The Quickening”