Cold Fusion Video Reviews

aka It Came From… Somewhere Else, Chapter 3

• Directed by Howard Hassler
• Written by Patrick V. Johnson
• Starring
  • William Vanarsdale
  • Robert Buckley
  • Richard Speeter
  • Donald Aldrich
  • George Carlson
• Produced by Timothy O. Johnson
• Executive produced by John Bruhn, Patrick V. Johnson, Allen M. Johnson, and Joseph A. Johnson

The longer I’m at this reviewing game, the more rules of good cinema I discover. Unfortunately, I notice them most in the breach, when isolated filmmakers (though not isolated enough) somehow fail to realize the importance of some factor or practice which the rest of his cinematic compatriots would honor intuitively.

Today brings the codification of a newly-realized rule of good cinema, the kind of thing which you wish you didn’t have to tell people who think they can make movies:

Bunch of assholes ≠ comedy

Not that it’s impossible for disagreeable characters to be funny; far from it. Most comedy derives from various forms of cruelty, either on the part of the characters interacting or on the part of the audience, laughing heartlessly at the poor schlub who’s just stepped on a banana peel. But dumb smallmindedness does not therefore equal comedic gold, any more than Karo syrup blood necessarily equals frightful horror. And simply watching a parade of stupid, venal people parade around on screen without any wit to their actions is so far from humor as to be physically painful.

Boy, I’m convinced.

In other words, this movie thinks very much that it is a comedy, and yet manages to be roughly as funny as dandruff.

And lest my opening diatribe mislead you into believing that unsympathetic characters are the greater part of this movie’s sins against the common good, let me correct you: There’s more. So, so much more.

To describe the plot of the movie is almost entirely futile. In fact, the world “plot” shouldn’t even enter my description, because the word connotes a logical progression between the scenes, some sort of cohesive narrative structure, which is wholly absent from this movie. The closest one can come is by acknowledging that events depicted happen in roughly chronological order. Now, there are movies which can pull off plotlessness, usually on the strength of the individual scenes. But as I may have mentioned by now, the individual scenes of this comedy are not funny.

Nevertheless, the old college try: No-Red Radar Command, which is two guys sitting in front of a computer and a TV set in someone’s basement, picks up a blip. The cause of the blip, a badly-superimposed light fixture which makes you long for the days of paper-plate flying saucers, settles in or near Grand Bosh, Minnesota. And then stuff happens.

The most lifelike member of the cast.

“What kind of stuff?” you ask (though I try desperately to silence you). Stuff like the typical necking couple sees the light go overhead. So the boy, Joe (Allen M. Johnson) ditches his girlfriend Julie (Jane Rudowski) to hop in a car with his drunk male pals to go check it out. When a policeman stops them at the end of a dirt road and tells them to turn around, Joe thinks it’s the funniest thing in the world to sneak the transmission into “drive” and run the cop over, despite the driver’s objections. Heck, he does it again. Ha! He ran over a policeman! Boy howdy, the funnies just don’t get much better than that, do they?

No, they don’t. Julie never makes it home (she’s become the prisoner of the “alien” cop, but it’s not like this really matters), so the next morning her father, Mr. Buckner (Richard Speeter), calls Joe to find out what happened to her. Buckner’s the only gentle, unassuming person in the whole movie, so naturally everyone treats him like crap. Joe hurls invective at him on the phone, interspersed with calling his mother “you old bitch.” Ha! Insulting people without provocation! Stop, my sides! So Buckner calls on the local law enforcement, who also treat him like dirt: Sheriff Munchinson (William Vanarsdale) and his deputy Don (Don Aldrich), who’d rather just sit around their offices and gripe about having to work. Ha! Unlikeable cops! Boy, what giggles! The bad news is that Munchinson is the closest thing we have here to a protagonist, and he’s about as likeable as a mouse turd in your Rice Krispies; the good news, such as it is, is that this movie’s such a formless mess that calling anyone a protagonist is imposing a sense of storytelling dynamics where there is none.

Munchinson and Don go to investigate reports of an abandoned police car, towing Buckner along (literally — he’s caught in the door). When the get there, they are assaulted by a “flying” rubber hand on a fishing line. When they try to shoot it out of the air, they accidentally plug Buckner, and the film stock switches momentarily from black-and-white to color for the “shocking” footage of Buckner spurting blood like a Peckinpah character. they trundle the wounded Buckner (yeah, they’ve got to keep their whipping boy around) and the hand back to town. Meanwhile, other hands are growing in the fields. I shouldn’t even tell you that, because the hands then disappear entirely from the movie. Somebody forgot their ADHD medication before continuing work on the script, I guess.

Hey, Kool-Aid!

Oh, and people are starting to spontaneously combust all over town. Rarely does it take place on screen (and when it does, it’s singularly unimpressive), but it’s happening. Mostly, Sheriff Munchinson is cheesed that anyone wants him to do anything about it, but he does call Washington, and after putting up with the Department of Bureaucracy for a while (Woo-hoo! Check that government humor!), he gets a special agent sent out to him, Art Rumbo (Larry Sutin), world’s least likely ladies’ man. (His mere presence in the department’s waiting room causes the receptionist to strip seductively down to her birthday suit — in yet another color snippet. How desperate do you have to be to take it all off in a film THIS cheap?)

There’s plenty of other stuff that’s already happened so far — the mayor (George Carlson) wandering around town in his plaid jacket, television interviews with farmers who saw their livestock combust, the town doctor (Robert Buckley) who habitually gives every patient about seven hundred X-rays, two hicks in a pickup involved in a “homage” to the Close Encounters “passing lights” scene — but here’s the bottom line: We’re at twenty-nine minutes into this sixty-eight minute feature, and this is the point at which I put my pen down and said, I’m not taking any more notes. I don’t care anymore. I’ll keep track of my Notable Totables, but I won’t note anything that happens in the movie. I’d rather be watching static.

So all I’ll tell you about the rest of the movie is some of the stuff that happens: Further unimaginative abuse of Buckner and his wife (Scott Babcock — yes, that’s right). A broad parody of Erich Von Daniken. Aliens who turn out to be a fat guy in a hairpiece and a karate suit (Jerry Trigg), and two kung fu experts (Neng Vang and Chu Vang, whose rote-rehearsed lines are delivered with such poor pronunciation that they have to be subtitled), attacking the town despite the fact that the alien cop (Robert Havel, by the way) proclaims that theirs is an entirely peaceful mission. Talk of an alien-caused cold snap, mostly to cover the fact that production carried over into the winter. A “driverless” car whose driver is clearly visible more often than hidden. Rednecks, led by Joe, firing guns into a country house for five minutes straight. And a credits-heralding nuclear strike, reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove (1964) in the same way that a frozen Lynn Wilson burrito is reminiscent of a state dinner with the President of Mexico.

Sheriff Munchinson, in all of his glory.

It’s a comedy. That’s what it says on the box. But I never laughed once. Or even smiled.

Here’s what it comes down to: There’s absolutely nothing to like. I already remarked upon the lack of likeable characters, but even then, there should have been SOMETHING that I could enjoy. The script. The plot. Special effects. Cinematography. Music. Editing. ANYTHING. But not a single part of this movie rose even to the low-water mark of baseline competence.

Of course, the defenders of this movie (and they’re out there — no human endeavor is so entirely devoid of merit that you can’t find some yayhoo sticking up for it) will try to justify all of the above with the all-purpose B-movie: “It’s intentional camp!” To which I reply, “Bite me.” Intentional camp, when cited in lieu of any discernible wit or talent, is aspartame-sweetened, soy-based, artificially-flavored counterfeit entertainment. Its only value as a recreational diversion is to possibly remind the audience of some other, genuine entertainment vehicle which they honestly enjoyed, and hope that the goodwill is expansive enough to cover the ersatz version.

It’s only too easy to see that the main inspiration in that regard here is Plan 9 From Outer Space (1958), Ed Wood’s unintentional comedic masterpiece. But there’s the crucial detail: It was unintentional. Wood didn’t set out to make a ridiculous comedy: He thought he was making honest entertainment, complete with thought-provoking depth. The fact that it’s so ludicrously funny is in large part a result of his full-bore but misplaced sincerity. But imagine for a second: What if Wood had tried to make it as a comedy?

“I recognize all the words, Nathan, but the meaning of the sentence escapes me.” Try it again: What if Ed Wood had tried to make Plan 9 a comedy? What if he had turned his remarkably wide-ranging ineptitude to the production of an intentionally humorous feature? It would have sucked so badly every human on the planet would have had to hold onto the sofa to keep from being pulled into the naked singularity of unfunniness. Dwell on how bad it would have been for a moment. Now imagine the entertainment value of such a film made not by Wood, but by the bastard lovechild of Ed Wood and his neighbor’s Pekingese. Now halve it.

What, you didn’t believe that “inspired by Ed Wood” stuff?

You’re finally approaching the Level of Suck to which It Came From Somewhere Else aspires, but can’t quite achieve.

An endnote, of sorts: The DVD includes a short promo video which was presumably produced by a local Minnesota TV news program during the original production. One of the producers, Tim Johnson, appears to describe, incoherently, his vision of the finished movie, and he looks about fifteen years old. I know it’s more likely that he was somewhere in his early twenties, but he seems more like he had to have his mother drive him to the set every morning, then let him off around the corner so the other producers wouldn’t see. For a moment, I felt a pang of guilt, that I was going to savage some kid’s heartfelt movie-making ambition. Then I remembered: Junior’s cinematic epic just stole a feature-length span of my life and replaced it with poo. This flick deserves whatever I can dish out.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 17, plus however many casualties six 20-megaton nuclear warheads would inflict on a town the size of Grand Bosh
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 12
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0