Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by “Victoria Sloan” (Dave DeCoteau)
• Written by Matthew Jason Walsh
• Starring
  • Patrick Flood
  • Jeff Peterson
  • Samuel Page
  • Kim Ryan
• Produced by Vlad Paunescu
• Executive produced by Charles Band

Charles Band was probably gratified when he saw the reviews for The Dead Hate the Living, reviews which were better than normal for late-period Full Moon videos; he was already planning a mini-run of zombie related titles, of which Prison of the Dead is the next one.

Expect no such praise for this one.

We open in a limo home, on the way to a funeral home, with a setup remarkably similar to that of the original Puppet Master: four friends are on their way to the funeral of the fifth one. They also haven’t all been in one place for years, and they also all are (or have been) deeply into paranormal research.

Hmm, says I to myself. Perhaps this will be like Puppet Master, but without all the padding.

That thought would return to haunt me with perverse humor.

After much expository dialog and bickering in the limo, they arrive at the New England funeral home, being played by Full Moon’s pet Romanian castle. (If you’ve been watching Full Moon videos for the past five years, you probably know this castle well enough that you could give guided tours. “And this is where Jack Deth’s ’slow second’ watch malfunctioned…”) There’s some more expository dialog and bickering as they stand outside in the cold before dismissing the limo driver to wait for their call.

I should probably walk you through the role call: There’s Kristoff, the richer one of this rich clique, who arranged this private viewing; Rorie, the more — what’s the word? — “shifty” one; Allie, the blonde, and Michelle, the brunette (terms which fully describe the depths of their characterization). The stiff is Calvin. All five are well-to-do, all are twenty-something Beautiful People, and all are young actors who’ve got nothing to their fame except other Full Moon fare (because once they qualify for SAG, they’re outside the Full Moon budget).

Also surreptitiously on hand are Kristoff’s college rival Bill, and two friends (one male, one female) whose names are not worth remembering. Bill’s upset about Kristoff boffing every co-ed Bill has his eye on, so he’s planning “mischief.”

Inside, they stand in front of the body of poor Calvin, and bicker between expository bits detailing the history of this funeral home — that it stands on the spot once occupied by Blood Prison, a Puritan institution used for witches, heretics, and various other unsavories. (Gee, and I thought a funeral home that looked like a crumbling European castle couldn’t get much more uncomforting; guess I was wrong.) It’s then that the great shocker is revealed — Calvin isn’t dead! Yuk yuk, it was just a setup with Kristoff to get the friends together for the first time in five years.

Instead, Kristoff takes them down to the basement, where the prison is intact. Then plot #2 is fed to us: Kristoff’s dad, a tabloid publisher, is holding a million-dollar contest revolving around the legend of Blood Prison: That the three executioners who used to work here were buried somewhere on the grounds, and that one of them has the Talon Key, a mysterious key supposed to open a cursed cell in the prison. Kristoff’s plan: To prove to his father all that paranormal hocus-pocus stuff is true by helping his friends find the key. He pulls out a ouija board…

And we spend the rest of the running time either wandering or running around the castle, fleeing three hulking undead executioners, getting randomly possessed by the spirits of the executed witches (and then promptly offed by the executioners), having mostly-clothed sex (naturally), and of course bickering pointlessly.

I may have made a mistake, in that my description may sound adequate as the plot of a motion picture. If I have done so, I sincerely apologize. It is not. The entire cast of characters is completely unlikeable and uncompelling; I honestly didn’t care if they lived, died, or merely wandered off camera to be forgotten. On top of that, despite the fact that they have all supposedly paranormal investigators and enthusiasts, you couldn’t prove it by me; they don’t seem to know squat about the occult — in fact, the very presence of a Ouija board seems to spook them beyond all reason.

Bill and his entourage were, if anything, even worse; I’ve never seen before such a blatant addition of characters for the sole purpose of increasing the cannon fodder; Bill’s ostensible reason for being present is quickly and off-handedly negated in a later scene so that, you know, we don’t have to mess with subplots.

Directorial chores were handled by long-time b-movie director David DeCoteau, working under the pseudonym “Victoria Sloan” which he commonly uses for Full Moon work (Shrieker, Curse of the Puppet Master, Talisman, Alien Arsenal). Normally I think of DeCoteau as a very competent craftsman saddled with uncompelling scripts, but this time even he got on my nerves. Turn off the blue lighting, Dave! I know there’s a thunderstorm and all (how can I forget, with thunder and lightning every fifteen seconds?), but jeez!

But the largest blame can be laid at the feet of screenwriter Jason Matthew Walsh. Walsh wrote and directed the shot-on-video stunner Bloodletting in 1997, so I know that he can write pointed dialogue, but somehow he opted to fill this screenplay with nothing but pointless dialogue. It’s perhaps a common failing in zombie-related movies, since so much of the running time of the original Night of the Living Dead is taken up with argument; but in that movie, dialogue actually worked toward a theme, that of male inability to cooperate in the face of a perceived “challenge” to Alpha Male status. Here, the bickering is redundant, vague, stilted, and dull, by turns; static scenes of people spitting on each other abound.

But I guess all that padding is necessary, since this “feature’s” running time is a whopping 64 minutes (67 if you generously include the entire closing credits). Without the filler bickering, we’d have a pretty good short here.

You know what they say (in that annoying little couplet) about “it might have been” being a really damned sad phrase. Here, that truism rings doubly true. The idea of an abandoned prison, still haunted by the spirits of the incarcerated witches and guarded by the undead executioners is just plain groovy. The executioners themselves have a certain class to their appearance, and their rising from the peat — er, earth in the misty night holds unmistakeable echoes of De Ossorio’s Blind Dead movies (an echo which effects guy Jeff Farley references as intentional in the making-of segment). Of course, the idea that treasure hunters couldn’t find three corpses buried four inches beneath the surface, each holding a metal implement (axe, mace, or scythe) stretches credulity, but nowhere near as badly as the other 63 minutes of footage.

Perhaps saddest of all is that this movie will invariably be compared to The Dead Hate the Living; and whereas that movie was undeniably writer/director Dave Parker’s labor of love, Prison of the Dead is solidly what viewers have come to expect from Full Moon in recent years: “product.”

So here’s my open letter, and challenge, to Charles Band (and you can be sure I’ll do everything in my power to get this in front of him):

Mr. Band, give me the go-ahead to write another Prison of the Dead movie, completely on spec — no obligation for payment or production. It would probably be titled Prison of the Dead 2, though the more appropriate label would be Prison of the Dead: Version 2.0. I propose to take all of the cool elements too easily glossed over here — the incarcerated witches, the executioners — and give them a new setting in a script which is actually interesting between deaths. (After all, it takes no more money to film a page of witty dialogue than a page of leaden dialogue.) I’ll abide within the current Full Moon guidelines: use of the Romanian castle, limited cast, minimal on-set special effects and Fat Cat Post CGI enhancements.

I’ll write the script completely on spec, and you can look at it. If you hate it, fine; it will languish forever in a drawer. If you like it, produce it and pay me what you would normally give a first-time screenwriter.

If you need proof of my competence with the written word, I have an on-line writing portfolio at www.nathanshumate.com, complete with spec scripts, published fiction, and other writing.

Quite frankly, I think it’s a gamble that’d be worth your while.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 7
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 1 (which lasts from the opening credits to the closing credits)
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0