Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by John Gilling
• Written by Peter Bryan
• Starring
  • Andre Morell
  • Diane Clare
  • Brook Williams
  • Jacqueline Pearce
  • John Carson

Class. That’s what “British” used to mean: a sense of decorum and civility and boundaries and what not. Not that that’s always a good thing — heaven knows, supercilious stiff-upper-lip types have annoyed locals the world over. But with the demise of that famous British reserve in the post-punk era, it’s really a product that no one’s selling anymore. That’s what makes Hammer Films such a hoot; coming as they did when exploitation films were really hitting the mainstream worldwide, they managed to take those same stories of horror and action and ever-increasing hints of sexuality — and dammit, they made them classy. These were the films of a transitional period in pop culture the world over, and they’ll not pass this way again, alas.

And now, for a moment of ethnic sensitivity.

This one almost threatens to be a genteel tiki-flavored horror film, to boot: in a dank underground lair, a man in a striking leather mask and white robe does a little voodoo blood-sprinkling ritual over a plasticine voodoo doll, causing Jacqueline Pearce (in another location) to wake in the night, screaming. All the while, a trio of warpaint-encrusted Caribbean types beat on the bongos like there’s no tomorrow.

But we veer away from the tiki stuff soon after, and back to what Hammer specializes in: Britness. We’re sometime in the vague 18th or 19th centuries (the pip-pippiest of eras), and Sir James (Andre Morrell), noted physician and professor, is on holiday at home with his grown daughter Sylvia (Diane Clare). Thanks to a letter in the post and some exposition-laden dialogue, we find out that Sir James’ star pupil, Peter Tompson (Brook Williams), is now town doctor in a small Cornish village where a strange malady is striking down locals with apalling regularity, and Dr. Tompson is stymied. And since Tompson married Sylvia’s old school chum Alice (that’s Jacqueline Pearce), and since Sir James is bugging out on holiday — these are the days before you could kill time watching the “white trash on parade” of daytime talk shows, remember — they decide to take an investigatory trip. (Ah, the British — they can even take a huge lump of exposition and make it classy, even without Diana Rigg. Have I played that whole “British gentility” thing too much already? All right, I’ll lighten up.)

They don’t even wait until they get into town before running afoul of the locals; on the coachtrip, Sylvia exhibits anachronistic compassion for the quarry of a handful of foxhunting ruffians, and sends them off in the wrong direction. Then, as they get into town, they run smack-dab into a funeral procession; and when the foxhunters come back to express their displeasure at being played for patsies, they semi-intentionally bump the pall-borne coffin off the bridge, splaying the deceased for all to see in the gully below. And the deceased’s brother Tom (Marcus Hammond) decides to take it out on the newly-arrived travellers instead of the ruffians in red coats.

“So how do you keep your hands so soft?”

And things don’t get better when they get to the Tompsons’ house. Alice, to put it bluntly, looks like hell and acts like a narcoleptic, and is very protective of a mysterious cut on her wrist. Sir James finds Dr. Tompson, meanwhile, at the pub, being berated by Tom and the other locals for letting a full dozen people die for no known reason in the last year; these same locals, however, soundly deny Tompson any opportunity to do an autopsy (damned hicks). More germane exposition follows: There’s no coroner, Dr. Tompson is at his wit’s end, and he’s not supported in his quest for autopsies by the local Squire, Clive Hamilton…

…and match-cut to Hamilton (John Carson), getting ready to perform a ritual as soon as his fox-hunting pet ruffians get back. Oh-ho!

The Redcoats! The Redcoats are coming!

That night, Sylvia spies Alice taking an unannounced after-hours walk on the moors, and follows her toward the abandoned mineworks outside town, but is waylaid by the foxhunters, who drag her back to Hamilton’s place and toss her around, preparing to treating her in ungentlemanly ways. It’s Hamilton who steps in and rebukes them, then sends Sylvia on her way; she proves pretty strongwilled for having come within an inch of gangrape, and manages to tell Hamilton and his thugs off very civilly before rejecting his offer of a ride back to town. And when she finally makes it as far as the mineworks, she gets to see Alice’s corpse being tossed from a pumptower — by the zombified version of the young man who was so rudely decoffinated earlier that same day.

And this is all in the first twenty minutes. It’s hard to summarize this movie, because it’s got one helluva screenplay — very dense, with events essential to the story happening in every scene. A rare commodity in any era, I tell you.

Boogah!

But let’s see: Tompson and Sir James plan an unofficial exhumation that night, and are interrupted by the local constabulary — but there’s nothing to charge them with, because the coffin they’ve uncovered proves to be empty. And when Sylvia reports Alice dead, they all trek out in the morning to recover her body, and find the passed-out Tom nearby, who drunkenly corroborates Sylvia’s story — that his own dead brother was wandering the moors that night. Tompson and Sir James finally have a corpse on which they can do an autopsy (poor Tompson — the guy should be ready to climb the clocktower by the end of all this), but it shows nothing. The men of science are at a standstill… and Hamilton is continuing his machinations, visiting Sylvia to express his condolences and maneuvering to accidentally cut her hand on a broken glass, then surreptitously collecting her blood.

Eventually Sir James puts the disappearing corpses together with word that Hamilton had spent several years abroad, specifically in Haiti, plus readings from the vicar’s library on witchcraft (and the fact that the recently interred Alice decides to rise from the grave), and comes up with the only hypothesis: voodoo-controlled zombies!

Any resemblance between this mask and a certain Modernist scultural bust is purely coincidental.

As I mentioned, this one’s a beast to summarize. But I’m in favor of this kind of beast. None of the running time is taken up with filler; every scene advances the plot, while simultaneously maintaining that classically spooky atmosphere for which Hammer is known. (Granted, having authentic old English villages to shoot in always helps.) By the end, we’re awash in ominous fogs and zombie slaves working a supposedly “abandoned” tin mine, and only the smarts of our open-minded men of science can save the life of Sylvia and rescue the village. All with, yes, a good portion of gentility and decorum (except when you’ve got screaming, terrorized women, which have always been a good excuse for a break with decorum in these things).

Like all Hammer productions, it’s very dated, but in a good way; you honestly could not make a movie like this today, which obviously has exploitative elements at its core but presents them so tastefully and spookily. And though I’ve harped on it past all reason, it’s so terribly British. Stolid intelligence saves the day, instead of the rash bravery which characterized American heroes of that (and this) era. Alas, there are seemingly no cultures left which idolize such traits in their popular entertainment.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0 (actually, there was one going on outside my window while I was watching, but that doesn’t count)
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Doctor Who: 9