Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Written and directed by Michael Almereyda
• Starring
  • Peter Fonda
  • Elina Lowensohn
  • Martin Donovan
  • Galaxy Craze
• Produced by Amy Hobby and Mary Sweeney
• Executive produced by David Lynch

We’ve seen all kinds of bad movies around here — movies made too fast, movies made with bad film, movies made without a plot or point — but I think this is our first official pretentious bad movie.

It ain’t just a flick, see — it’s art. You can tell because it was shot in black and white, and there are long static shots in perfect composition which remind you of gallery prints, and interspersed there are handheld pixelvision shots all over the place, and the characters talk about themselves incessantly. That’s art, right?

Eww. Give me real crap any day, rather than poop that thinks it doesn’t smell.

There is a plot in here, despite how the art house crowd disdains such things: Dracula gets tracked down and killed by the current Van Helsing. But Dracula’s daughter, Nadja, coincidentally gets involved in a lesbian relationship with Lucy, wife to Jim Van Helsing, legal nephew and actual son of the Van Helsing that offed her papa.

But since this is art, of course, we can’t just go with the linear plot. We need flawlessly constructed scenes which are just like Calvin Klein ads — very beautiful in a dry flat way, but also very static: every scene in this movie is constructed to display itself, rather than build any impetus into the next one. It’s like watching an entire ad campaign of avant-garde commercials back-to-back.

And that pixelvision — I understand that indie filmmakers have adopted it as a filming choice, but shouldn’t there be rhyme or reason to why it’s used in a particular scene? If there was a scheme here, it eluded me completely.

Being an indie movie, it of course keeps scoring to a minimum, relying instead on indie-band music — again, keeping the whole thing as suspenseful and impetus-filled as a cK One commercial. In a few places, the musical cues were suddenly, laughable awkward (the Tinkerbelle-style harp run comes to mind).

And then, in an odd twist in the last ten minutes, the action moves from NYC to Transylvania and the filmmakers belatedly try to inject a sense of urgency and impetus into the storyline. Of course, by this time it’s too late — they’ve already got 90 minutes of inertia to overcome, and there ain’t no way to do it.

A note about the lesbian scene: It’s nice to see that, with all their pretensions, the filmmakers were “polluted” by the intensely commercial no-budget vampire films available at such outlets as Salt City. However, being an art film, we’ve got to somehow make this sex scene unappealing — and I can’t speak for everyone else, but the whole menstrual thing did that for me. Eww.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• dream sequences: 0 (unless you count the entire movie, which seemed like one of the dreams I have when I’m on medication)
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0