Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Jane Simpson
• Written by Brian DiMuccio and Dino Vindeni
• Starring
  • Mimi Reichmeister
  • Sheeri Rappaport
  • Jennifer Rubin
  • Jack Nance
  • Zelda Rubinstein

OK, here’s the premise: Six Catholic girls stay at the Catholic school through the Easter holiday and discover an occult tome.

Now, just think for a sec: what would an Italian have done with this premise?

Answer: lots. There would have been tons of sex, even more violence, and a heaping portion of blasphemy and desecration, not to mention overt gender politics.

Now, how did Little Witches handle this premise?

A little bit of sex, necessary violence, and completely glossed-over blasphemy. Gender politics? What’s that?

See, these six girls (cliche role call: the good girl — named Faith, nothing like being blatant; the bad girl; the brain; the black girl; and the fat girl) are present when workmen bust through a wall and discover a closed-in baptistry, where six corpses have lain for about a hundred years. Seems there was a group of poetically-inclined students called the Illuminatis who disappeared around that time…

So the bad girl leads the girls in a seance, and there’s an earth tremor, and a statue splits and reveals a musty book written in Latin, which Faith can read, naturally. (Has anyone in Hollywood ever actually translated anything? The idea that someone can, on the first reading, translate a text without stumbling or offering alternate wording is ludicrous.) Seems they can summon up Old Nick himself, an idea which the bad girl loves so much she manages to convince the rest to go along with.

Oh, yeah, Faith also has a love interest, Construction Boy. Construction Boy is actually an architecture student on a work-study program. He’s got trendy-grunge hair, tight abs, and no discernable personality. The editors obviously chopped the part of the rough cut in which Faith and Construction Boy get to know each other, which is just as well.

There’s also the kindly priest (Jack Nance, Voodoo, Twin Peaks) who enjoys fishing, the young nun (Jennifer Rubin, Screamers, Nightmare on Elm Street 3) who tries to relate to the girls (a futile effort — these are teens, remember? “Relating” would play havoc with that whole “nobody understands me” mindset), and the creepy old nun who keeps to herself (Zelda Rubinstein, Poltergeist).

And all of it amounts to… a whole bunch of stalling to get to the good part of the movie. Which never materializes.

Instead we get a couple of stupid parts (why would an ambulance turn on the siren to transport a hundred-year-old corpse to the morgue? shouldn’t a stone statue look a little less like styrofoam?), a lot of red lighting, a bad girl who goes from aimlessly rebellious to murderously devoted to Satan without a blink, a fat girl naked (eww), a Lord of Darkness who looks like a big bug handpuppet, an order of warrior nuns which distinguishes itself by its ineffectiveness, and plot gaps the size of the San Andreas Fault.

Best line: “Do you have an sins of a non-dietary nature you’d like to confess?” - Priest to fat girl in confessional