Cold Fusion Video Reviews

aka Dead City

• Written, produced and directed by Matt Jaissle
• Starring
  • Tim Lovelace
  • Jeff Rector
  • Ron Asheton
  • Heather Fine
  • Bill Hinzman

Remember that Universal Soldier craze of the early ’90s? You know, when it was like every other movie was about undead or reanimated soldiers?

Of course you don’t. It never happened. Universal Soldier, starring both Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, ended up slightly more popular than the solo offerings of either star, and thus spawned two direct-to-cable sequels (with neither star) and a ten-years-later sequel with Van Damme, but it didn’t exactly sieze the popular imagination and spark a trend on the level of, say, self-referential slasher flicks or natural-disasters-R-us.

Nevertheless, you could probably make a good case that Legion of the Night is one of the few (perhaps the only) Universal Soldier progeny.

“Tell you what — you don’t mention Jurassic Women, and I won’t mention Revenge of the Living Zombies.”

There’s this scientist see, Dr. Bloom, who’s played by Bill Hinzman. You don’t know Bill Hinzman? He was the oh-so-famous Cemetery Zombie in Night of the Living Dead. And ever since then, he’s been doing small parts in smaller movies, always billed as “The Cemetery Zombie from Night of the Living Dead!” I’m sure he’s a wonderfully nice guy, but if you’re looking for someone whose post-NOTLD cinematic career looks even more pathetic than John Russo’s… Anyway. Dr. Bloom has figured out a way to reanimate dead tissue, but since he was unable to get a grant for such a worthy project, he borrowed money from the mob. And since the mob likes to know what you’re using their money for, they found out about the project — and thus forced Bloom into using his creations as assassins. “Cybernetic Zombie Assassins,” or CZAs, if you prefer.

All of which is background to our opening: The black-clad, masked, goggled CZAs move through a suburban house, disposing of three individuals with quiet efficiency. Then Bloom’s assistant, the porcine and slobbish Russell (Ron Asheton) drives them back to the lab in the seedy warehouse district (of Detroit, according to the closing credits). Bloom expresses his deep moral quandary about the work they’re doing, but then it’s kinda taken out of his hands anyway. Mob boss Francis (Jeff Rector, leading man of such flicks as Jurassic Women and the Salt Lake City-lensed Nightfall), the kind of bad guy who slicks back his hair and wears sunglasses at night just to look cool, shows up with his cronies and plays the good news/bad news game. Good news is, tonight’s hit was the last one. Bad news is, the Mob doesn’t have the best retirement policy. His goons then pepper Bloom, Russell, and the entire lab with enough bullets to supply your average Central American revolution.

Fast-forward to, well, at least a few weeks into the future, when Bloom’s son Taylor (Tim Lovelace), an Angry Young Man, comes back from Overseas. (That’s where he’s been. “Overseas.” It’s mentioned a few times, but nobody seems to have anything more than that vague idea of where he’s been, even Taylor himself.) Taylor lets himself into the locked lab warehouse by gymnasticking himself and his duffel bag onto the roof and down through an air duct, where he’s met by Russell — miraculously alive, but now afflicted with a bum leg and a bad heart. Russell fills Taylor in on the end of dear old dad, and like the dutiful son he is, Taylor swears revenge. (”Swears” is right — with his command of the more colorful adjectives in the English language, I’m going to guess that his time Overseas was in the Navy.)

Wow — Dr. Bloom musta been using the same computers for all twelve years of his research.

So Taylor and Russell montage themselves into rebuilding some of the decimated CZAs, to be interrupted only when the girl Taylor left behind, Heather (Heather Fine), comes in with a gun in her hand. Apparently he done her wrong when they parted, and she’s bearing a massive grudge — though, naturally, an Angry Young Man like Taylor isn’t going to admit to any wrong-doing. Imagine the reunion scene between Indy and Marion in Raiders of the Lost Ark (but much more senseless and slipshod, and with bucketloads of profanity), and you’ll pretty much have it. And naturally, because they’re fuming mad at each other, they start kissing and fall into bed. (I often wonder exactly what parallel dimension it is that these scenes take place in…)

So naturally she joins their team (falling for the story that they’re working for a Japanese arms dealer), and they field-train the CZAs in, well, a field, shooting at plywood cutouts. Then Taylor, who’s apparently trying to keep his vendetta a secret from her, practically drops in her lap his little city map with “Francis’ house” marked in a big X. She storms out, unwilling to go along with this revenge fantasy. (Sure, you can do that; me, I’ve committed to sticking out the rest of the movie.)

Of course, as soon as she leaves the premises, a loooong stretch limo pulls alongside her, and Francis waves her in with a gun, thus demonstrating the tactical error of setting up one’s revenge-plotting endeavor on the grounds where the event being avenged took place. He roughs her up, as a smarmy bad guy must, and sends her back with a warning to whoever’s messing around in the lab.

Producer/writer/director Jaissle was apparently very taken with Phantasm at an early age.

It’s a little late, though, because that night, the plan goes into action. Francis and his posse meet some other lowlifes (lowlives? whatever) in an abandoned building for some drug negotiations, and the CZAs burst in and wipe everyone out. Yes, including Francis. Our main heavy just bit it halfway through the feature. And then, just for good measure, the CZAs stick around until a couple of cops show up in response to the gunfire, don’t call for backup, and make good targets of themselves. Scratch two cops.

From there, the CZAs go on a rampage across town, but that’s mostly off-screen, because apparently there are more important things to show you, like:

Three guys in sterile suits (complete with baggies on their shoes — but oddly enough, nothing on their hair) entering a plastic-lined room with garbagebags of lumpy matter. Then one of them strangles another, while the third watches. The strangulation turns out to be a mistake, because the deceased has the wrong blood type. Oh, and one of the bags holds Francis’ head.

Don’t worry that you have no idea what I’m talking about here; I didn’t understand it when I saw it either. And just to make sure that we have a longer break from what’s left of the plot, we then get to see these two bozos mug a woman in a parking garage, check her ID for her blood type, and shoot her.

Top: Taylor. Bottom: Damned dirty ape.

Back to the “real” plot, then, as Taylor discovers in the morning that the CZAs never came back — and the newspaper reveals that black-clad assassins with high-powered weapons have been killing people at random all over the city. It seems we’ve got just a wee glitch with their programming, doesn’t it? Taylor does what you’d expect an Angry Young Man to do: He heads out to stop the CZAs himself, armed only with a shotgun in a shoulder sling.

It doesn’t take long before hee sees a goggled head peaking out from the top of a parking tower, so off he goes for some hand-to-hand combat — at which he does surprisingly well, considering how easily these attack zombies have wiped up everyone else they’ve come up against. Doubly impressive, when the CZA reveals his comic-booky gadgets, a buzzsaw on one wrist and Wolverine-style claws on the other hand. Despite all this, Taylor almost gets the drop on him, until one of the other CZAs round the corner and gets Taylor full in the chest with a shotgun. Then the other one plunges his claws into Taylor’s chest and really wiggles them around in there. So Taylor’s dead on a rooftop. The end.

Just kidding, although fact that he’s not dead really has me wondering about that earlier “alternate universe” hypothesis. No, instead Heather shows up with a shotgun (don’t even bother asking how she found him) and almost rescues him, before being cut down herself by bullets.

And the next thing we see, a mostly dead Taylor is collapsing in the doorway to the lab. That’s right, we skipped right over how a severely-injured man escaped five able-bodied attack zombies. Even if he’d had no opponents to evade, it’s not like he could just saunter down a few city blocks, covered in his own blood, without someone detaining him somewhere. But no matter; he’s back, and he realizes with his dying breath that nothing living can defeat the CZAs. Nothing living. So he makes Russell promise…

“Do NOT mess with the Marvel Comics legal team!”

And Russell immediately turns Taylor’s corpse into a CZA (though, I guess owing to the freshness of the corpse, he can back as himself, not as a mindless and programmable zombie).

So Taylor goes out on the town that night to finally put the kibosh on the CZAs, who are now apparently concentrating on killing annoying winos. He gets four of them, and the fifth runs off. It’s a pretty good night, but when he gets back to the lab, he finds a note typed in a computer screen: Russell’s been kidnapped, and the assailant also has the secret of the “synthetic adrenaline” that is the key to the CZAs’ strength. Taylor’s so upset by this that he knocks over a microwave. (No, really.)

And it’s back to the abandoned building where Francis bought it — because the mysterious abductor is Francis. Apparently, see, he had had his own people working on a way to duplicate Bloom’s process, so when he was cut down they used him as a test model. (Would have made much more sense not to shoot Bloom’s lab to unrecognizable pulp in the first place, but I obviously don’t have the mind for organized crime.) And like Taylor, Francis appears none the worse for wear except for gray greasepaint on his face. Oh, and the fact that he’s got a box duct-taped to his throat, and speaks like one of the chipmunks. (It’s a little damned late in the movie to try for intentional humor, folks!)

The ending is even more boring than the preceding. Suffice it to say that it involves Russian Roulette with a shotgun, Russell’s established weak heart, explosing arrows, and stupid policemen who say “Freeze!” and then pull the trigger anyway.

There were a few moments, back in the first twenty minutes, when it seemed like this movie might actually become “Stupid-Competent” — not a good movie by any token, but at least fairly entertaining. But, one suspects out of sheer perversity, it keeps veering away every time it looks like something’s going to be done right.

The biggest impediment to enjoyment has got to be Taylor himself. Simply put, he’s a moron and a bastard. His reaction to just about everything around him is unfocused anger, which he expresses both crudely and unimaginatively. You’d be tempted to cut him some slack for the death of his father, but then the backstory with Heather confirms that, no, he was an unthinking, unfeeling jerk to begin with.

Then there’s the fact that our main bad guy simply disappears for the whole middle part of the movie. Here’s a clue, free for the taking: If you’ve got a revenge-motivated plot, you kinda have to put off the actual vengeance until the finale. Sure, it turns out that Francis is alive at the end again for a showdown, but Taylor doesn’t know that. And neither do we. Instead, we’ve pulled the plug on the impetus for the entire plot about halfway through, and we have to go off on that “The CZAs are running amuck!” detour just to fill out the running time.

This is not, as one IMDb commentator put it, a contender for the worst film ever made; all that does is show that said commentator is sadly underinformed in matters of bad cinema, and probably ought to keep his life simpler by sticking to the movies that show up with forty copies on the Blockbuster new release wall. It’s not that bad, but it is distinctly annoying, and I don’t suppose there’s anyone who weeps when the closing credits finally get around to rolling.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 22 (plus 1 cat)
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 15
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• homages to Raiders of the Lost Ark: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Jeff Rector (Francis) played “Alien 2″ in the TNG episode “Allegiance”