Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Written and directed by Ken Wiederhorn
• Starring
  • Michael Kenworthy
  • Thor Van Lingen
  • James Karen
  • Thom Mathews
  • Marsha Dietlein

It’s rare to find a movie whose title so completely encapsulates the entire cinematic experience. This isn’t just a sequel, no. It’s a sequel to an “original” film which was itself very blatant in having been “inspired” by yet another movie (a fact that’s referenced in the dialogue, no less). It’s a copy of a copy, and it loses quite a bit for each generation. The movie, while being adequate on a technical/mechanistic level, is as bereft of creativity and originality as its title.

Our first warning comes with our first scene (Warning #1!): An army convoy transports some of those mysterious cylinders whose leakage caused the brouhaha of the original Return of the Living Dead. Said transport is taking place a) on a rainy night, b) in unsecured open trucks, and c) right through the middle of a residential area. Oh, and the drivers are young unskilled recruits passing a joint back and forth. And there’s no jeep or anything following the trucks. And a couple of barrels bounce out of the back of the last truck and bounce down the side of an embankment, into the water under a bridge.

“Trick or treat!”

Now, you all know that I’m not an expert in things military, but even little ol’ civilian Nathan can tell that this is so wrong in so many ways. I mean, the substance in these containers is so dangerous that an entire town was wiped out by a nuclear blast in the first movie to prevent the spread of the zombie toxin. Are we supposed to believe that such a risk is being transported as if they were moving furniture?

No, “supposed to believe” really doesn’t enter into it; we’re simply not supposed to think about it. It’s an example of “screenwriting for convenience,” and we’re going to see a hell of a lot of it in this movie.

Our next scene takes us to a recent housing development, where young Jesse (Michael Kenworthy) is strong-armed by neighborhood bully Billy (Thor Van Lingen, a name that simply inspires giggles) into being the third member of their little club. Now, there’s a new one — militant adolescent inclusionists! And yeah, the other kid is kinda there, but he’s not even worth mentioning by name. (Warning #2! Our protagonist is a pre-adolescent kid. Horror movies with kid heroes very rarely work, because no one’s willing to make a movie in which the kid is put in actual, immediate jeopardy — which kinda nullifies the whole point of a horror movie.)

Remember Linnea Quigley’s lengthy nude scene in the the first Return of the Living Dead? This is as close are we’re getting here, Bucky.

Billy leads him out to their clubhouse — the unlocked mausoleum at the next-door cemetery. Jesse kind of asserts his unwillingness to be a part of the party by running away, at which point the other two boys give chase. (Militant exclusionists?) Jesse hides in a storm drain, and when the other two find him, the three of them together discover one of the canisters. (The second of the two canisters is never mentioned. Probably just as well.) Jesse notices the “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY CALL” number stenciled on it, but Billy drags him back to the cemetery and locks him in the mausoleum so that he can’t call the army before they can mess around with the canister.

Meanwhile, we meet Ed (James Karen) and Joey (Thom Mathews), a couple of graverobbers coming to swipe some skulls. Warning #3! As I’m sure you know, Mathews and Karen played two of the main characters in the original Return of the Living Dead, and really their characters here are pretty much the same: Karen still plays the older, more experienced but none too bright guy, and Mathews is still the young milksop just beginning an unsettling job that day. And this is basically an extended in-joke for the whole length of the movie (right down to a deja vu comment from Joey late in the movie).

“Uh, this isn’t what it looks like. Really!”

Thus, good kid Jesse is released and runs home, and Ed and Joey are still on the premises (with Joey’s girlfriend inexplicably waiting in the van for hours on end) when Billy and whatsisface break open the canister, which predictably spews out huge gouts of foul-looking fumes into their faces, then proceeds to spread across the cemetary.

And you know what? I could tell you all that happens after that, but I don’t really see the point. You’ve seen zombie movies before; more to the point, you’ve seen lame zombie movies before. So you know exactly what’s going to happen. The dead rise, pushing through the soil as if it were loosely-packed peat moss. Ed and Joey are accosted by their intended collector’s pieces, and also get a good lungful of the fumes. Jesse tries to get his sister Lucy (Marsha Dietlein, the poor man’s Kerri Green) to listen to him (their parents, naturally, are out of town). But no one pays attention to The Kid Who Actually Knows What’s Going On until the hordes of the dead force Jesse and Lucy and Ed and Joey and Tom (Dana Ashbrook, the young cable guy who was there to hook Lucy up, wink wink nudge nudge) and the requisite drunk Doctor Mandel (Philip Bruns) to band together and try to get away.

Yawn.

Why Dick Clark no longer makes morning appearances. (Hey, it was either that or a Keith Richards joke.)

The original Return of the Living Dead was a hit-and-miss exercise. It lacked the somberness of Romero’s films, but it did have a biting sense of humor and creativity in the portrayal of the dead. In this sequel, the humor has changed from “biting” to “yuk-yuk”, the dead are far too clean and fresh-looking, and all the characters act just like people in movies do (as opposed to people in real life). In the original, When Mathew’s character become a zombie and chased his girlfriend for her brains, it was one of the few genuinely creepy bits; when it happens in this one (whoops, hope that didn’t spoil anything for anyone), it’s played almost completely for laughs.

And then there’s the zombie kid — Billy the bully. Because if we’ve got a juvie protagonist, we’re going to have to bring him up against a juvie antagonist; can’t have him facing a foe who’s actually overwhelming, can we? Unfortunately, a pubescent zombie with gelled-up hair and latexed face may be an appropriate opponent for the wimpy kid hero, but given that the audience for this movie is, at youngest, teens or later, it’s just not the personification of horrific evil that we need to see. It’s just a zombie bully, not appreciably meaner than when when he was a live bully. Big whoop. (And I should note that the other kid, who also got a lungful of zombie gas, never shows up again.)

All of which is especially disappointing when one remembers that Ken Wiederhorn had also given us Shock Waves a decade earlier, an aquatic Nazi zombie flick that was, if short on plot, very long on atmosphere. One wonders if he spent it all in one place.

Yes, we get it. Very funny. Ha, ha. Next!

I suppose one could chart here the same progressive de-horrification seen in such film series as A Nightmare on Elm Street or, more visibly, the Evil Dead movies (a topic explored more than thoroughly by the good Dr. Freex). Unfortunately, not only is this movie appreciably more benign than its predecessor, it’s also visibly stupider, and thus is not worth the brain activity a comparable analysis would entail.

In fact, this movie’s so underwhelming that I think it’s about time I stopped thinking about it. You probably should too.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 7
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 3
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • James McIntire (one of the officers) played “Hali” in the TNG episode “Who Watches the Watchers”