Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Paul Kyriazi
• Written by Denny Grayson, Salli McQuade and Joe Meyer
• Starring
  • Ronald L. Marchini
  • Adam West
  • Mike Bristow
• Produced by Jo Anne Marchini

Seems I’m unwittingly in the middle of a tribute to that festering, putrescent corpse which is Adam West’s career. I didn’t even notice his name on the box when I brought it home.

But he’s not the star, honest. That would be Ron Marchini, yet another fighter-guy trying to become the next Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude Van Damme or even Don “The Dragon” Wilson. Unfortunately, it just ain’t gonna happen because Marchini CAN NOT ACT. I’m not even saying he’s a poor actor (and I’ve seen a lot of bad acting of late); I mean he can’t act, well or poorly. He can remember his lines; most of the time he can approximate the appropriate emotion (not too hard, since he’s only called upon to smile once — the rest of the demands upon his talent fall under the “looking tough” label).

This one was painful.

Marchini is John Travis, one of the few cops left in a post-apoc world. They say it’s a post-apoc world, anyway, but all they keep talking about is the greenhouse effect and solar flares; I can’t see any signs of nuclear or conventional warfare. As far as I can tell, the only thing that’s been wiped out is the suburbs, and the world’s been transformed into an endless series of light industrial sites and loading docks.

But back to the cop. These few cops go on raids from their underground bunker (which looks to me, from the surface, justs like a professional office suite fourplex) to bust up slavers and other undesireables. And there’s Adam West! Down in the bunker, talking on the microphone, never interacting with any actor outside. This is what they call a “confined cameo”: put a name actor in a part where he never has to change rooms, then shoot all his scenes in a day or two, and ta-dah! He’s in the entire movie!

But back to the cop. He and three fellow cops go out to bring down some slavers. They show up at the auction and think it’s a good idea to try to hold guns on roughly forty natives. (And their plan after that was…?) Things go sour, Travis’s three buddies get killed, and the big bad guy named Wraith — who looks like the cop from the Village People gone bad — gets away.

But then (hold on to your brains so they don’t die of plausibility deprivation) there’s this solar flare, see (you can tell because the camera man washed everything out), and suddenly Adam West doesn’t want to let Travis back in. Apparently, these solar flares affect you, make you go crazy (but only sometimes — Travis is fine), and infect you with a disease that makes your skin go black and smudgy — that is, more so that usual.

So Travis finds a fresh and stylish change of clothes (odd that most of the people here are dressed like bag ladies, and he can find decent attire — but then, maybe it’s a fashion statement; there are tons of teenagers today who choose to dress like bag ladies), and the slave girl he rescued from the slavers (Yay! You kept one person alive, cop!) hide out in the locker room of an abandoned ballpark. At least, they say it’s abandoned, but that infield grass looks pretty green and trim. So much for the water shortage they’re always whining about.

Are you noticing that I’m having trouble getting to the plot? That’s because there isn’t one. Travis rescues another girl in a pointless shootout; he then chases someone across town because they’re wearing his hat, and rescues another girl (all of whom, it should be said, are easy on the eyes, but none of whom do anything of consequence or contribute to the movie in the slightest). Travis drives around in his jeep, looking at a world that doesn’t look post-apoc at all (they couldn’t even find a condemned building for a backdrop?), listening to ersatz surf music, and finds the bad guys breaking into the bunker. After consulting with Adam West inside, he blows up the bunker (with two smallish lumps of plastique) to kill the bad guys.

Mere words cannot express how unimpressive this movie was. The box had the audacity to compare the film to both Blade Runner and Terminator; I call upon our holy B-movie jihad to find out who wrote this box copy and kill him by making him watch the damned movie. Twice should do it.

I mean, come on! Here’s a further list of grievances:

The post-apoc bad guys look like they were each given thirty bucks and sent to the Salvation Army to make their own costumes.

Some old doctor is running a half-rate “hospital” — so they litter around an academic-looking building, and presto, it’s the hospital! The good doctor starts contemplating suicide as the three women bicker pointlessly — and he wasn’t alone!

When the action gets slower than cold molasses, we’re treated to a foot chase — a long, drawn-out foot chase — and this happens repeatedly (including one up and down the bleachers at the ballpark).

No man in the future knows how to protect his balls — at least five guys got their family jewels reset.

I warn you. Do not lose 90 minutes of your life to this movie. And while you’re at it, watch out for it’s sequel, cunningly renamed Karate Cop.

One good line:
Cop to his buddy cops: “If a hundred people come running this way, let the first one go by — that’ll be me.”

One notably bad line:
“I took a drug to kill myself, but that didn’t help either!”