Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Written, produced, and directed by Damon Packard
• Starring
  • Damon Packard
  • Nicole Vanderhoff
  • Chad Nelson
  • Beverly Miller
  • Elliott Joseph Brakeman

You know me. I can talk about any movie. Good, bad, or (even worse) indifferent, I can still find some way to crank out a thousand words of meandering commentary.

But right now, I honestly have no idea how I’m going to fill the space between here and the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound at the bottom. I’m pretty damned near speechless.

Because I have no idea what to say about Reflections of Evil. I don’t even know how to start this review.

Um… I have no joke for this.

(Discarded Openings #1: “How much can a speechless reviewer say? Let’s find out together.”)

A plot description? Awful hard, because to do that you have to have a plot. There’s about an eggcupful of story here, of sequential events with a causal connection and a beginning-middle-end structure. This movie is largely 2+ hours of imagery — surreal, brutal, kinetic, engaging imagery. But describing imagery in print is stupid; it would be easier to point you toward the TV screen and say, “Here — this is what I’m talking about.”

But I’m not sure I’d want to do that either, even if my 2.7 weekly readers were within easy commuting distance.

Here’s what’s going on, in broad outlines:

There’s a fat guy named Bobby (director Damon Packard). He’s only moderately fat to begin with, but bloats as time goes by. He walks the streets of LA in his slovenly clothes, trying to sell knock-off watches on the sidewalk, in between fits of inchoate rage over life’s indignities. (Did I just use “inchoate” right? Let me check… Nope. let’s just call it “fitful” rage instead. Or “sudden, volatile” rage. Yeah. That’ll do.) And it’s not just him; it seems he’s always stumbling into other people frothing at the mouth with undirected anger, aiming it either at him or at each other.

Or this either. (What, does EVERYTHING have to be a joke with you people?)

Interspersed with this, the elderly couple who lives across from Bobby’s grandmother’s house watches TV constantly — a TV that seems stuck in a time warp, channelling commercials and promo spots from around 1970. Thus, we get to see faded footage of the new fall season on ABC (watch for The New People!), Wonder Bread bags with animated faces, Joey Heatherton giving Serta Perfect Sleeper mattresses their best ad campaign ever, and the little back-from-commercial jingle of the ABC Movie of the Week.

(Discarded Openings #2: “When Pop Culture Gets Angry — next on Cold Fusion Video!”)

In fact, intellectual property appropriation is all over the place, from Pillsbury to Froot Loops to footage from Attack of the Clones and the LotR trailer. It’s pretty easy to date whole chunks of street footage: musta been around New Years 2001, when Miss Congeniality posters were blanketing busstops and convenience stores.

If this seems like a disgression on my part, well, it is. And it isn’t. Because to digress you have to get away from the point, and this movie isn’t about a point. It’s mostly imagery of impotent rage — of Bobby eating cream-filled junk food and vomiting, of random people gibbering at buildings and passersby, of Kai’s PowerGoo distortions of faces that’s strangely effective in playing up an unfocused paranoia and sense of unreality. Whole ten-minute sequences are nothing more than people screaming abuse at each other on the streets. If I were to quote any sizeable chunk of the ad-libbed dialogue, I’d type “f*ck” so much it would wear out my asterisk key.

I wish I could say that this was the point at which the movie started getting “weird” for me, but…

What I’ve told you so far may make it sound that the movie’s utterly tedious and ineffective. But it isn’t — at least, not to the degree you might think. From the beginning, where odd camera tricks and post-production hues blend with ’70s era TV schmaltz music, the stage is set for at least the grudging acceptance of the surreality. It’s like a pop-culturally poisoned right hemisphere fever dream. It’s a bizarre, perception-altering drug on DVD.

(Discarded Openings #3: “It’s rare that a movie gets both of my frontal lobes throbbing.”)

If one thing is clear, it’s that Packard was passionate about making this movie, and not only in the common blood-sweat-n-tears sense of scraping the movie together on his own. As the character of Bobby is the largest single element of the whole non-narrative, it has to work, or nothing else works — and Bobby works. Packard isn’t afraid to present himself as a corpulent, powerless, futureless loser, motivated by an odd mix of gluttony and ineffectual fury. The homemade fatsuit that expands him as the movie progresses is less than completely convincing, but Packard’s performance makes up for it. The character becomes fatter from the inside out.

They killed Aunt Jemima! The bastards!

However… remember when I said that it’s not tedious? Well, I lied. It gets there. Part of it is that, with no story structure pulling things together, there’s no sense of progress through the movie. You feel like you’re getting further from the opening credits without getting closer to the closing credits. About seven times,the screen went black, and I said, “Oh, is it over?” (There’s no time listed on the DVD cover; I had no idea it was going to keep going for over two hours.) There are long interludes of a completely different tone — Bobby’s sister (Nicole Vanderhoff) in 1971 going on a drug trip, or an overlong scene set in that same year of a young Steven Spielberg (Dean Spunt) directing a scene from Something Evil. It’s hard to say that they pointlessly distract from the main action, since the main action is itself pointless, but they’re a different kind of pointlessness.

(Discarded Openings #4: “See a reviewer become as inarticulate as the movie he reviews!”)

And there’s only so much unfocused rage that can be shown without numbness setting in. Which means that some of the more brilliant conceits — Bobby listening dreamily to The Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” while walking past homeless people puking blood on the sidewalk, or “Schindler’s List: The Ride” at Universal Studios Theme Park — come after the viewing brain is getting beyond caring.

Yeah. You and me both, fella.

Oh, and that little bit of plot I mentioned? It mostly comes into play at the very end. And unlike movies such as Carnival of Souls or Jacob’s Ladder, the big reveal at the end doesn’t make all of the seeming insanity make sense. At best, it explains about five percent of the movie; the rest of the movie stays insane.

(Discarded Openings #5: “Reflections of Evil is sort of like Carnival of Souls. Except not really.”)

So. Strangely engaging and offputting in roughly equal portions, kinetic by the inch but slow-moving as a whole, brilliantly skewed pop-cultural references interspersed with leaden surrealist “gags” that fall dead, and at least twenty minutes too long … I probably would appreciate it more if I weren’t such an old-fashioned, stick-in-the-mud “story” kind of guy, and enjoyed sensory onslaughts more without trying to find a plot structure. But despite that, I think it might have left a hook or two lodged in my brain. At the very least, I’ll never look at babbling street people quite the same way again.

(Hey, lookit! A full review! Hot diggity!)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8 (I think)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 10
• dream sequences: kinda nonsensical to even try and keep this tally
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Anthony Zerbe (appearing uncredited in cribbed footage from The Omega Man) played “Admiral Matthew Dougherty” in Star Trek: Insurrection