Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Written and directed by Thom Eberhardt
• Starring
  • Robert Beltrane
  • Catherine Mary Stewart
  • Kelly Maroney
  • Sharon Farrell
  • Mary Woronov

It’s kind of funny that, of the three movies that have made Catherine Mary Stewart’s face familiar to fanboys in the ’80s (the others being The Last Starfighter and Weekend at Bernie’s), two of them spend an odd amount of time fussing around with videogames. But then, we are speaking of two movies that came out in 1984. There are worse pop-cultural trends to have one’s face associated with (lambada immediately comes to mind).

Stewart plays Regina, an eighteen-year-old movie theater usher with an obsession with an unnamed videogame and a projectionist pseudo-boyfriend Larry (Michael Bowen) who makes some money sneaking movie prints out for bootlegging. His apropos pick for the night is It Came From Outer Space — apropos because this also happens to be the night that a much-anticipated comet is grazing the earth’s atmosphere for all to see. Supposedly, this comet hasn’t been around for 65 million years — when the dinosaurs suddenly went extinct. (How, one wonders, would you calculate an ellipse that big from the scanty data they’d have?) And everyone’s out ready to party while watching the lightshow, just like they later would in Independence Day. Gee, that doesn’t sound ominous, does it?

Note, if you will, that they never actually show a comet or anything.

Anyway, Regina and Larry spend the night in the steel-lined projection room in order to sneak the print back first thing in the morning, while everyone else is out gazing at the tremendous one-nite-only lightshow. (Obviously, this was made in anticipation of the return of Halley’s Comet in 1986; given the thundrous zap-filled display here, people who saw this movie and expected the real comet to be in any way analogous were presumably greatly disappointed.) “Everyone else” includes Regina’s überbitchy stepmother Doris (Sharon Farrell), who’s stepping out with the neighbor while Dad, a Green Beret, is off fighting some Central American war. Regina also has a younger cheerleader sister, Samantha (Kelly Maroney), who takes off after being decked by the step-mom, and spends the night in a gardening shed.

Which is good, because aside from those few people who’ve spent the night in metal-shielded locations, every other damned person (and, presumably, animal) who is exposed to the comet’s radiation ends up… Well, remember that old Star Trek episode where a disease eventually reduces the crew of another starship to a handful of rock salt inside a collapsed uniform? Sorta like that, except it’s a handful of red dust instead of rock salt. (Leftover prop from V: The Final Battle? I dunno.)

This is, frankly, the best part of the movie: The sun coming up through red-tinted smog on an LA where no one — absolutely no one — is in evidence. Streets are completely empty, except for piles of clothing on sidewalks and the occasional car still running at a stoplight, with ominous Christmas music (”It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”) playing on the radio. Sprinkler heads pop up and automated store lights come on; aside from that, nothing. Nothing except our few survivors.

And some zombies.

Convenient of the zombies to dress in hunters orange, isn’t it?

Apparently, people who had only minimal protection don’t get turned to dust, at least not immediately; instead, they become pasty-skinned, sore-covered, white-eyed zombies craving human flesh, a fact discovers when Larry, miffed that his contact hasn’t come back with the movie print, ventures obliviously out the back door and gets hisself et.

Regina ventures out a different door, takes about ten minutes of wading through dusty clothes to finally clue in (a zombie attack also helps spur her mental processes — fortunately, Daddy taught his daughters to take care of themselves), and makes her way home, where she and the returned Samantha commiserate. And then they have a brainstorm: the radio, which has been belching out low-grade 1984 rock-pop incessantly since the movie started! Let’s go find the DJ!

Unfortunately, what they thought was a live on-air personality turned out to be pre-recorded voicetracking (bane of all radio everywhere, if you ask me), but the trip does have a bonus, in that another survivor had the same idea: Hector (Robert Beltrane), a trucker who had survived sleeping in the back of his cab. (Boy, good thing that it wasn’t some groady old stinking trucker who survived, huh?)

Pretty effective wetness protection, I’d say.

And it’s here where you might want to go and fix yourself a snack and leave the video going. Because it looks like writer/director Thom Eberhardt had a beginning and an ending, and hoped to fudge his way through the middle. It didn’t work, and so the entire second act is padded like a couch cushion, with scene after scene in the neon-lit studio, accompanied by synth keyboards and drum machines. (Hey, I loved the ’80s as much as anyone, but lackluster music is bad no matter what the decade.) We’re so desperate for story here, we even fall back on that old shocker, the nightmare-within-a-nightmare. Then Hector heads up to check on his mother in San Diego (and encounters a zombie child — and I can’t tell whether the scene was being played as comedy or not), and the girls, naturally, go on the requisite shopping trip, to the accompaniment of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” (Listen, there is no way ever to do a shopping mall scene in a zombie movie without referencing Dawn of the Dead, and reminding the viewer acutely that it was a much better movie. So just don’t attempt it.)

Gee, the very last breeding couple on earth. How awkward would THAT be?

It’s only after the girls are attacked by half-zombified nightshift stock boys who’ve taken over the mall that we get the other plot thread we’ve been waiting for: another group of survivors from a thinktank installation, led by Dr. Carter (the ubiquitous character actor Geoffrey Lewis), is rounding up the onesies and twosies, over the objections of sullen thinktanker Audrey (Mary Woronov). It’s from them that we learn that even after-the-fact exposure can start an individual on the path from normal to zombie to a puff of dust. And that rash that Samantha’s developed? We don’t call that a good sign.

There is a nifty plot twist in the last ten minutes, and since it’s one of the things done right, I won’t spoil it for you. But I will say that, coming as it does on the tail end of almost an hour of waffling non-story, it’s too late to fuel the fires of enthusiasm. And the fact that the great adventure of the climax is almost comically simple for the protagonists to accomplish doesn’t help things.

The population’s so low, THIS guy can qualify as a bad-ass.

What is kind of surprising, though, is the almost Pollyanna-ish conclusion, which has Regina, Samantha, Hector, Samantha’s plot-contrivance boyfriend (can’t have a post-apocalyptic society rely on polygamy, after all), and two rescued children setting out to re-establish civilization mainly by putting on a happy face. Apparently, the continuation of electrical power in the city is taken for granted (how else will the ’80s music continue forever?), and no one seems to wonder what they’re going to survive on in an urban environment once the canned goods are gone (or how the ecosystem will be impacted by the complete dearth of animal life — which, technically, is never mentioned, but seems to be a common-sense extrapolation). That’s even ignoring the miraculous (by divine screenwriter fiat) non-issue of everyone’s eventual zombiehood.

More than anything, the entire feature seems to be a set-up for the real story (or at least the story I’d like to see) — to wit, deciding whether to try to continue 20th-century civilization in a city being retaken by entropy or to head out and start over with a clean slate (with a gene pool too small to be viable anyway). But Night of the Comet didn’t impress anyone enough to spur a sequel, anyway.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 12 (plus, like, everybody in the world)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• dream sequences: 1 (or 2, depending on how you count a dream-within-a-dream)
• ominous thunderstorms: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Robert Beltrane (Hector) played Commander Chakotay on Star Trek: Voyager (the “Night of the Comet” of Trek series)