Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Stuart Gordon
• Written by Dennis Paoli, based on the short story by Edgar Allen Poe
• Starring
  • Lance Henriksen
  • Rona De Ricci
  • Jonathan Fuller
  • Frances Bay
  • Mark Margolis
• Produced by Albert Band
• Executive produced by Charles Band

This movie occupies a rarified niche in the Full Moon food chain, in that it’s one of the best of their offerings, exceeded only by Castle Freak (1995). It’s not surprising, then, that both movies were made by the same people — director Stuart Gordon and frequent collaborator, screenwriter Dennis Paoli. Both had worked with Charlie Band in the pre-Full Moon days, so in many ways both of these movies are more an outgrowth of earlier projects like Re-Animator and From Beyond. Notably absent are such standard Full Moon features as colorful monsters with cutesy names more personality than their fodder; Gordon and Paoli don’t look like they were interested in supporting the box office with a spin-off toy line. Instead, they focused on making (gosh, who would have thought?) a horror movie that actually disturbs and horrifies. And they did a pretty dang good job.

The opening scene is your first warning: the evil Torquemada (Lance Henriksen, wearing the goofiest tonsure in all Christendom) has a crypt opened because its occupant has been posthumously found guilty of heresy. In a scene fraught with black humor, Torquemada’s henchmen remove the skin-n-bones corpse and string it up to receive twenty lashes, in front of his horrified widow and son. The corpse doesn’t survive the lashing; by the end, there’s nothing but an armbone left in the ropes, and the rest is scattered across the floor. The pieces are gathered into a great mortar and pestle and crushed to powder, which is emptied into Torquemada’s hourglass.

Welcome to Toledo. (Roll credits across slow shots of vintage illustrations of animate skeletons rounding people up, accompanied by probably Richard Band’s best score, full of haunting choral elements.)

Our protagonists are Antonio (Jonathan Fuller), a young baker, and Maria (Rona De Ricci), his beautiful young bride (I’m a sucker for big dark eyes). Antonio’s the entrepeneurial type; his great idea is to bake bread especially to sell to the crowds attending the auto da fe, the public executions of the Inquisition. Maria would rather make love, not bread; she’s something of a tender heart, a pure spirit who can’t really get behind this blood’n'torture version of the Gospel (though she also can’t seem to say anything bad about any man of the cloth). Alas, Antonio should have taken his wife’s proffered roll in the flour; Maria can’t stand the sight of the heretic (the widow of the unfortunate corpse) being slowly strangled while her son is horsewhipped (did I mention that this isn’t the usual “safe” Full Moon flick?), and leaps to the boy’s defense — an action which brings her to Torquemada’s attention. She pleads for mercy for the boy, but the plea falls on deaf ears; it’s Torquemada’s eyes that she captures instead. He does what any dedicated-to-the-point-of-inhuman-fanaticism priest would do when faced by stunning beauty; he has her arrested as a witch.

And where is Antonio during all this? When the scuffle started, he got clubbed unconscious; he doesn’t awake until sundown, when an old beggar tells him that his wife is now an incarcerated witch.

Maria, meanwhile, is submitted to the initial indignities of the “investigation,” the first being a naked examination for a “devil’s mark” — any seeming blemish or mark which could be the sign of a witch’s covenant with Satan. Of course, the lackeys are simply tickled pink to examine her flawless body, but Torquemada’s initial “enchantment” only deepens are he stares at her flesh. This, methinks, is a man with some serious repression coming to the fore.

The examination of course finds something (if only because one of the lackeys pinched her — “Look! It’s a mark!”), and she’s thrown back into a cell. Her “roommate” is Esmerelda, a filthy old woman who, surprise, actually is a witch! Not a Satan-worshipper, mind you, but a midwife and herbalist, who also recognizes in Maria a sweet soul with that certain “gift.”

Torquemada, meanwhile, turns to his Master Torturer, Mendoza, for a little help, in the form of flagellation to help purge his mind. Mendoza’s an interesting character, with crucifixion wounds kept fresh in his hands by Torquemada. (Eww.)

And, to bring in the final building block for the rest of the plot, Antonio buys his way into the castle with Gomez, the undertaker — who immediately betrays him.

Now. Continuing in this depth of detail is tempting, because there are many things to discuss — but that would deprive you of that initial breath-taking from discovering things you didn’t expect. And there’s a lot to take you off-guard here. Torquemada’s lust drives him to actions which he blames on Maria’s “enchantment” of him; Esmerelda tries to help Maria defend herself against the attacks on her person and soul, before she herself is executed (in a scene which is far and away the most credibility-robbing of the whole movie); and Antonio finally ends up a victim of the Pit and the Pendulum.

Oh yeah, that. Almost forgotten it, hadn’t you? That’s the danger of adapting a short story like this one (really little more than a vagnette) into a feature-length story; you have to add so much — like maybe a plot — that the initial inspiration is in danger of getting shoved to the side and tacked on almost like an afterthought.

However, to help fill things out, there are several references to other Poe tales. “The Premature Burial” is pretty blatant; and when a cardinal from Rome (Oliver Reed) arrives to tell Torquemada to tone it down and Torquemada immediately invites him down to the wine cellar to have a little nip of Amontillado, you somehow know the cardinal’s not going to find his way back to Rome.

I had hoped to give The Pit and the Pendulum a rating, but in the end several things left me unsatisfied. Here they are:

The humor. Black comedy has its place, as does more simple tension-relieving buffoonery. However, given the monstrous nature of Torquemada, the historical figure, and the incredible cognitive dissonance that allowed him to arrange the torture and execution of over a hundred thousand “heretics” while somehow attributing his actions to the Gospel of the New Testament, I felt guilty about enjoying any levity in the movie. By making a movie about Torquemada and his evil, I think Gordon put himself in a position where even a subdued level of levity is inappropriate and cheapening.

The supernatural elements. Esmerelda introduces them when she speaks of Maria’s “gift,” and brings them to the fore when she later helps Maria go to her “safe place” to escape the torture; it dominates the ending, as Torquemada is beset upon by the spirits of those he’s killed, as Esmerelda cursed. Again, in a movie so centered on human evil — on the evil that humans can conceive and inflict upon each other without any “outside” help, on evil that doesn’t depend on a supernatural belief system to admit — it seems to me that the introduction of this kind of “spiritual recompense,” especially so long after the materialistic setup of the storyline, is like lowering the net as the game is played.

Even allowing these flaws, however, I heartily recommend this movie. It will probably cause some actual thought, and images seen here will linger with you for days — unusual effects of a Full Moon movie, so consider yourself warned.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 11
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 1
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
  • Stephen Lee (Gomez) played “Chorgan” in the TNG episode “The Vengeance Factor,” and the bartender in the first part of the TNG two-parter “Gambit”
  • Mark Margolis (Mendoza) played “Dr. Nel Apgar” in the TNG episode “A Matter of Perspective”
  • Jeffrey Combs (Francisco the recorder) had two recurring roles on DS9 — one as Brunt the Ferengi, and the other as Weyoun the Vorta (any one of a number of clones), including one episode in which he played both; he also showed up on DS9 as “Tiron” in the episode “Meridian,” and as “Mulkahey” in the episode “Far Beyond the Stars” (in which he also played Weyoun); most recently, he appeared on Voyager as “Penk” in the episode “Tsunkatse”
  • Tom Towles (Don Carlos) appeared on DS9 as “Klingon Hon’Tihl” in the episode “Dramatis Personae”, and “Dr. Vatm” in the Voyager episode “Rise”