Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Written and directed by Olaf Ittenbach
• Starring
  • Michael Carr
  • Russell Friedenberg
  • Kimberly Liebe
  • Matthias Hues
  • Hank Stone

By the end of this movie, I had come to the conclusion that it had been written, filmed and distributed for the sole and specific purpose of annoying the hell out of me.

But for the first ten minutes, I was ready to believe that it may just be an undiscovered minor classic. It’s beautifully shot, I will give it that, and those opening scenes manage to promise evocative, multi-leveled storytelling to come. It’s a promise that is soon thrown out the window, in favor of… well, what I’m about to describe for you.

The opening scene: A half-dozen men in pseudo-Judaic garb stride across the desert until they come upon a massacre site. The lone survivor — or is he the instigator? — gibbers at the feet of the men’s leader.

Cut to present-day Texas, where a couple of guys are hitchhiking to see their friend Joe. Luke (Russell Friedenberg) is a completely baked pothead; William (Michael Carr) is mainly distinguished by being the smarter of the two, which is probably the only reason he keeps Luke around.

“It doesn’t matter WHAT color suit you wear if you don’t look spooky-ass!”

Nearby we also meet a couple of supernatural sp00ks in natty gray suits: Jeff (Hank Stone), the sepulchral business-like one, and Nicolas (Harvey J. Alperin), the nebbish drunken one. Their mission is to kill the living, one by one, to provide an army of the dead for their Master. They spend most of their time bickering with each other; I think they’re meant to evoke those two rascally hitmen from Pulp Fiction. Oh, and they’re both dead, which is why Nicolas can repeatedly get hit by cars and slice his hand open with no lingering ill effects.

There’s also Geena (Kimberly Liebe), the pretty people-person barmaid at the local tavern in Ridgecrest, Texas, who may be More Than She Appears.

The first half of the movie alternates between these three storylines thusly:

William and Lucas are invited to hitch a ride with a driver (Chris Kriesa) who soon reveals himself to a sociopathic serial killer. He handcuffs them to thedoor handles, drags them across Texas, makes them pee their pants in a motel room, and generally keeps them alive mostly to make them sweat.

Jeff and Nicolas argue between and during their execution assignments. Jeff thinks Nicolas is an uncommitted sot who doesn’t take their job seriously; Nicolas thinks Jeff takes too long offering each victim their choice of execution, and plus, he hates the color of their suits.

And Geena goes about her business, which includes stopping a corner store holdup. This is where we start to realize that Geena’s not entirely human; when one of the robbers looks at her, he sees a face composed of nothing but a big-toothed mouth. (Geek cred moment #1: “Hey, that looks just like Alpha Flight #19!”) She’s also being watched from the shadows by a big silent blond man, played by Matthias Hues. (Geek cred moment #2: is it sadder that the only “name” cast member is Matthias Hues, or that when I saw him I said, “Hey, cool, Matthias Hues!”?) Since Hues’ character doesn’t get a name until the last few minutes, and since the credits even list him as “Blond Man,” and since “Matthias” pretty much fits the character, that’s what I’m going to call him.

“Wait! THAT’S not how you change a spark plug!”

This pretty much covers the whole first half of the movie, switching back and forth between storylines: The hitchhikers endure the indignities heaped on them by their captor; the two undead hitmen bicker and try out a different color of suit in between kills; and Geena goes about her business while everyone notes how purdy she is (except that one robber, naturally). For a long time, even though stuff happens, nothing seems to really advance the story or stories, although of course we’re all expecting that these three plotlines will intersect and make more sense.

Then, indeed, something happens: the movie pisses Nathan off.

Joe (Joe Cook), whom William and Luke were supposed to meet, tracks them down on a desolate road just as the boys are making a break from their captor. Joe rams the car with the truck, and the serial killer dies in the ensuing fireball. The three then walk their way several hours into Ridgecrest, the entire incident behind them.

To repeat: the entire incident behind them. After all, they were planning to meet up with Joe anyway, and it’s not like their experience has changed them at all, aside from leaving them hungry. We’ve been following William and Joe for half the movie now, and it’s just turned out that everything we’ve seen has no bearing whatsoever on the rest of the movie.

“When you’re smilin’, when you’re smiiiilin’…”

The three of them naturally stumble into the bar and grill at which Geena works, and William is instantly smitten with her. So while Luke makes an ass of himself with the local womenfolk, William tries to come across as the nicest guy who’s had to pee his pants in the last 24 hours.

Things start getting weird when Luke notices that some of the people are just… wrong. Like the girl with veins pulsing across her fact, or the other girl with the screaming face in her crotch. (Don’t ask.) Then Jeff and Nicolas show up with a posse of other dead sp00ks, and try to drag Geena away. William leaps to her defense, using the serial killer’s gun, and they make it back inside the bar. Unfortunately, the bar patrons that have been freaking Luke out turn out to be the legion of the dead that Jeff and Nicolas have been recruiting. A Mega-Battle ensues, with the undead nasties on one hand, and Geena, William, Luke, and Joe on the other — plus Geena’s German friends. Who? Oh, they were briefly introduced to William, for no other reason than that writer/director Ittenbach realized this late in the game that he was going to need some more characters (or rather, fodder) for his “holed up inside the saloon” segment.

And by the way, Jeff and Nicolas now disappear from the movie. Which means that two of the three plotlines which comprised the first half of the movie have proven themselves entirely irrelevant. Can you feel the heat of my displeasure, radiating from me like a sunburn?

“O large Person or Persons of whatever gender or branch of the animal kingdom…”

Matthias, who has been drifting around the outskirts of the action (and occasionally appearing in a stark white “other place” while conversing with his minions) now stands around outside with his legion, demanding that Geena, the “last of her kind,” come out to him. He gives the other survivors a two-hour time limit to surrender to him, which sets up what may be the single most inept example of a “ticking clock” suspense device in filmmaking history. It’s two hours, right? Except in what seems like the same conversation, suddenly there’s only an hour and a quarter left. Then after Geena, William and Luke try to escape out the back door (and have some sort of boringly surreal encounter wth Matthias), they come back inside for a John Woo-like “everybody point guns at everybody else” with the other survivors (I thought these were her German friends?), and then it’s only fifteen minutes left. Then someone mentions that they’ve got thiry minutes. Then it’s just over ten minutes. Was my DVD player randomly skipping around among the chapters?

If so, it was also skipping some chapters completely, specifically those that told me what the hell was going on. From the point of the original assault on the bar, second half of the movie seems like a full feature brutally slashed to half of its running time, with all of the coherent connector scenes left out. Which makes the fact that the entire first half was taken up with story elements that turn out to be dead ends that much more galling.

But wait, the final indignity is yet to come. Joe is dead, Luke gets pulled out the door by the dead, Geena tries to turn a shot German into an immortal being like herself to save her life and ends up creating a bloodthirsty creature who further decimates the survivors… and then, when William himself is about to die, Ittenbach tries to pull a “twist” that will remind you of The Devil’s Advocate, Carnival of Souls, or any of the most irritating Voyager episodes: everything from the midpoint of the movie, when William and Luke met Geena, never actually happened.

“Gramps allus sed Pa shunta married hissown sister…”

Let’s recap, shall we? The first half of the movie is irrelevant. The second half never happened. We may actually be witnessing the single most pointless story ever set to film.

It seems like half of the reviews I write end up harping on this point: Have a story before you make a movie. No director would try to make a movie without actors. No director would undertake the music, the special FX, or the cinematography without having gained those difficult skills. Yes somehow, far too many directors think that the writer’s contribution — you know, the story, the only part that can make everyone else’s effort worthwhile — is completely dispensable, and instead decide to do it themselves while having not the foggiest clue of what makes a story work. “Hey, I’ve seen those writers work; it’s just a bunch of typing. How hard could that be?”

Which is why we end up with movies like Legion of the Dead, full of sound and fury and investor’s capital, yet signifying nothing and satisfying no one.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 40 (and yes, that includes a lot that “never really happened,” and I just don’t care)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 4
• dream sequences: 1, maybe, depending on your definition
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Matthias Hues played “Klingon General #2″ in Star Trek 6