Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Jeff Burr
• Written by Jeff Burr, C. Courtney Joyner, and Darin Scott
• Starring
  • Vincent Price
  • Clu Gulager
  • Terry Kiser
  • Harry Caesar
• Produced by William Burr and Darin Scott

But first, my story:

I found a copy of The Offspring at the second place I called (Video Update, in case you care). Unfortunately, it turned out to be a newer copy, dubbed in EP, and my crusty old VCR sometimes gets finnicky about playing tapes in EP that it didn’t record itself. Fooey.

So I called every place on my list, went through all the Blockbusters and Hollywoods in my area without success; finally, at the very last store on my list, a little mom ‘n’ pop video store that’ll probably be driven out of business by the chains, I found not one, but two copies — and yes, they were recorded in SP.

Which just goes to show, you always find something not only in the last place you look, but in the last place you’d think to look.

Anyway. Anthology movie, with plenty of cliches:

First, the framing story. Apparently Oldfield, Tennessee is the sister city to Derry, Maine (The setting of Stephen King’s It, if memory serves), right down to the town librarian who’s figured something out. I gotta tell you, it really bugged me that the opening sequence, with the shower and the wedding dress, never got explained. It just kinda sits there.

Then the stories, most of which filled anthology-movie prerequisites:

- The requisite “unrequited love that goes beyond the grave” story. The incestuous overtones here (ew!) is what really made it creepy, but I think they also let us down. They gave us a pretty complete picture of Stanley the murderous nebbish (I was ready to give the movie high marks when he started singing love songs to a corpse after strangling her), but it was all so underused! Why does his sister take ice baths? Just to have an allusion to Lovecraft’s “Cool Air”? (The Lovecraft references abounded, but were put to little use.) Why does Stanley have all these nightmares if, as it turns out, he has nothing against necrophilia? And when the subtitle “Nine Months Later” came up, I said “Oh, I get it — the corpse is gonna have a baby that comes back and kills him,” and the movie basically said, “Yup, yer right,” and delivered it (ahem) without any creativity or suspense. The baby came back and killed him. The end. (After having watched It’s Alive Saturday night on TNT, I think I’ve had my fill of homicidal infants for the week.)

- The requisite “ne’er-do-well schemer who gets his comeuppance” story. The “mystic diagrams” in the magic book were copied from the spurious Avon Necronomicon — in magic marker, no less? What really sucked the wind out of this story’s sails was the incredibly lame doctor/nurse conversation at the end — it slowed everything down, gave everything away, and turned my stomach with the poor acting and dialog.

- The requisite carnival story — in this case, “Lovecraft’s Traveling Amusements.” Was it just me, or did the opening scene look a lot more recent than the 1933 period setting that Vincent Price had mentioned?

- The fourth story, sort of a “Civil War Children of the Corn,” was thankfully not an anthology prerequisite, but that didn’t help it much — it’s really hard to write menacing lines for children that don’t come out sounding ridiculous. Frankly, Children of the Corn did it better (which is pretty damned sad).

- And then — ouch! A small wound in the neck, and Vincent Price is dead.

Nathan’s final verdict? Too many steps removed from good anthology work, with some good actors sinking to the level of bad material, and worse actors failing to stretch up to the level of that same bad material. Not worth another rent.