Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by David Schmoeller
• Written by Joseph G. Collodi
• Starring
  • Paul Le Mat
  • William Hickey
  • Jimmie F. Skaggs
  • Robin Frates
• Produced by Hope Perello
• Executive produced by Charles Band

Everyone has their own dirty little secrets, and here’s mine: Up until the other night, I hadn’t seen a Puppet Master movie. (What, you were thinking I was going to spill some real dirt? Dream on.)

And now, having looked back and seen the original movie upon which Charles Band practically built his Full Moon empire (or at least his Full Moon Toy empire), I have to say… Charlie, you must have made a deal with the devil at some point, because there’s no way this flick justifies the franchise’s success.

I mean, there’s nothing specifically bad about the premise. And there are no glaring flaws in the film itself. But… well…

I don’t know if this fault can be laid at the feet of screenwriter Joseph Collodi for providing what was apparently an extremely undersized script, or those of director Gary Schmoeller, who decided that he could pad it out to feature length. But dear heavens, I haven’t seen this much on-screen padding since the Superbowl.

We open in 1939, in the Bodega Bay Inn in California, where puppeteer Andre Toulon has a room. Toulon is played by William Hickey, an actor usually described as “veteran,” which is Hollywoodese for “older than creation itself.” (He died in 1997, at the age of 168.) Toulon keeps himself company with some animated puppets of his own design.

We’re treated, at this point, to a full five minutes of Killer Puppet Cam. You think I’m kidding. I’m not. Time it yourself. Five full minutes of a steadycam held twelve inches off the floor, whizzing around the lobby of this hotel. And not a soul notices. Nope, nobody notices as an animated puppet with a hook for one hand and a jackknife for the other runs around and between their ankles. (All right, one person notices, but she’s clear up on the whateverth floor, after the puppet has passed all the other oblivious people in the lobby.)

If you think I’m harping on this too much, let me explain to you two cardinal filmmaking sins: Boring the audience right off the bat, and straining the suspension of disbelief right off the bat. Here we have both. I mean, how many minutes of steadicam footage do we need before screaming, “All right, I get it already”? And you tell me how many people wouldn’t notice something the size of a cat running around them, breathing heavily.

Anyway. Two German spooks in black coats enter the hotel; in anticipation of them, Toulon puts away his puppets in a secret compartment in the wall and shoots himself. End of prologue.

Ten minutes have now elapsed since the opening credits started.

Finally, present day. We’re introduced (through much padding) to our principal characters. How much padding? Let me tell you:

- Long, slow establishing shot of Yale University (helpfully identified in subtitles). Long slow shot of a man asleep in his office chair. Call him Alex; it’s his name. He’s dreaming of someone in an empty ballroom, shooting his companion. He wakes with a start, then looks down to see leeches devouring his stomach. He wakes with a start, this time for real. (Warning: This same “false wake-up” trick will be used a second time.)

- Establishing footage of a carnival. Inside a tent, the Southern-accented Gypsy (call her Dana) goes into a long fraudulent prophecy about her two clients’ future. A long, long bit of fortune-telling ensues. She then has a vision of something happening in a hotel.

- The worst offender: Establishing shot of the Statue of Liberty. Long establishing shot of the NY skyline. Establishing shot of cabs in the street. Establishing shot of a gleaming, glass-fronted building. (OK! We’re in New York! I get it already!) Establishing shot of the office suite door, that reads Pensa Research Inc. And FINALLY we meet two more characters, Frank and Carissa, who conduct really poorly-constructed experiments in thought transferance. (Someone should introduce them to the concept of a double-blind.)

Oh, yeah, New York has nothing to do with anything. Aren’t you glad we spent so much time setting it up?

Instead, our introduced characters assemble at the Bodega Bay Inn. Seems that a fifth friend, Neil, sent them all “psychic summonses” to the Inn. It also turns out that Neil is dead, leaving behind an innocent young widow who knows nothing of the psychic investigations in which he and his Psychic Friends Network had once been involved. Seems he’s been tracking down the lost secrets of Andre Toulon, who was rumored to have discovered the ancient Egyptian secret of bringing inanimate objects to life. (Too bad no one used the spell on this movie.)

Padding padding padding, as characters explain stuff to each other about Neil’s researches and reacquaint old hostilities and admire the hotel and [yawn] excuse me. By the time anything of any note happens — an animated puppet with huge hands and a pinhead crawls out of the coffin (named Pinhead, naturally) — a full thirty minutes have elapsed.

I’d like to say that the next hour picks up considerably, but you do the math: six possible victims (including the housekeeper), minus the two inevitable survivors, means one death for every fifteen remaining minutes. That’s not a lot of action. What can we fill it with? Why, meaningless interpersonal padding, of course!

There is, naturally, novelty in the animated puppets’ methods of dispatching their prey. Blade (the one who likes running around hotel lobbies), obviously has his hook and blade. Pinhead has, well, big hands; he punches and strangles people. Ms. Leech is a shapely female puppet who disgorges leeches onto her victims (aside from being a really improbable puppet skill, it necessitates that her victims already be tied or pinned down — leeches don’t work very fast). Tunneler is a bald SS officer with a conical drill on his head. And the ostensible leader is Jester, who really doesn’t do anything except spin his head around to change his expression. All are rendered with a combination of rod puppets and professional stop-motion animation, but that doesn’t change the fact that whole reels of film are expended on nothing in particular in between the more active bits.

Pad pad pad…

See, Gary Schmoeller directed a similarly thin script once before, 1986’s Crawlspace. The main difference is that Crawlspace starred Klaus Kinski, who could inspire frissons of terror simply by eating corn flakes. There’s no such forbidding presence here to take up the otherwise static proceedings. Instead, a plot that would have been about right for an episode of The Outer Limits is stretched to twice its optimum running time. Ho hum.

Given the lackluster quality of this, the founding movie in the most successful Full Moon franchise, I can only assume that the sequel got made simply because Charles Band hates to let props go to waste.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 6
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences & psychic flashes: 7
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Jimmie Skaggs (Neil) showed up on a 2nd season episode of DS9