Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Greydon Clark
• Written by Greydon Clark and Alvin L. Fast
• Starring
  • John Ireland
  • Yvonne De Carlo
  • Jack Kruschen
  • John Carradine
• Produced by Alvin L. Fast

There are days when I rethink my position on artistic freedoms, when I think that (for instance) movie cameras should be as tightly controlled as semi-automatic handguns.

These thoughts often surface after viewing the work of the legendary Greydon Clark.

Approaching a level of quality comparable to that of Ed Wood himself, but without the utterly sincere inanity of the Great One, Greydon’s too-frequent output deserves a single epithet: “Lame.” Lame stories, lame settings, lame actors (largely) delivering terribly lame dialog. And in this case, it’s more than just lame; it’s ’70s lame.

First up we meet our ostensible protagonists — four cheerleaders of Benedict High (in the town of Arnold, naturally) practicing on the beach with their incredibly vapid coach. The coach is so fufu that one would think her a sixties burnout, but she’s far too naive to have ever been part of the counterculture movement. In any case, to the tune of a wakka-wakka guitar, the cheerleaders also fool around and play touch football with the four members of the highschool football team. You read that right; as far as I can tell, this championship team has only four players. They all play and fool around and fire off inane sexual one-liners, above the objections of the Bryl-Creemed football coach. Oh no, but then a group of teens from rival school Baker sashay up and challenge them for the use of the beach. It is at this point that we realize that our so-called protagonists, along with their pet ballplayers, are no more likeable than their supposed anatagonists; all of them show a kneejerk disrespect for authority, all of them are trying to outdo the others in the feeble high school slut department, and all of them are as stuck-up as hell. Nevertheless, we are supposed to perceive that one of the girls, Patti, is “different”; in a moment of the frivolity, the other girls find her sitting on the sand, staring out to see seriously — “thinking.”

Anyway, back to “Who claims the beach?” The cheerleading coach (Ms. Johnson, in the unlikely event that you care) suggests they settle their differences with a chicken fight. In abbreviated form, just to get us up to the point where a semblance of a plot emerges: After the Benedictines’ victorious chicken bout, we cut to a night scene, in which a fat man takes a vow to Satan amidst the usual accoutrements: Big altar, Baphomet head, black robes, chalice of blood, etc.

The next day, we see who the fat dude was — it was the Benedict janitor, a stuttering man made fun of by all the players and cheerleaders, including the ostensibly special one. He’s cleaning up the TP mess made by the sore Baker losers, who also get into an All-American water fight with the Benedictines. (I should point out that this is the fifteen minute mark of the film; it’s also the point at which the previous renter gave up in disgusted boredom and returned the tape to Video Express — “Be kind, rewind” be damned! Would that I had followed this nameless renter’s lead…)

There are some more hi-jinx, like the ball coach chewing out football star Stevie for the water fight, and the janitor spying on the girls in the locker room (in which we see exactly two of the four girls shed their tops — a little racier than I would have thought for the original PG rating, and apparently I wasn’t alone, because the later video re-release bore an R rating), and Stevie switching the tags on the locker rooms so that the coach would wander into the girls’ with the dean of a religious college in tow (the coach doesn’t know which dressing room is which?). We also have reinforced to us one of the girls’ most annoying habits: When one says, “One for all,” the others are compelled by some hideous conditioning to reply in unison, “And all for one!” As annoying as this is, it is not the worst of the repeated refrains.

For the cheerleaders soon set out with Ms. Johnson to the game that night, with the janitor following after in his truck, fingering his little pentagram and chanting, “Audi praecus meos Satana blessed be!” We are treated to this little chant roughly eight thousand times in our ninety minute running time. It seems that his chant runs the cheerleadermobile off the road and keeps it from restarting, so he “kindly” picks them up, then drives off-road to his convenient satanic altar, under Baphomet’s watchful plaster eye.

It gets a little hazy here, and it’s not just me blocking out a bad viewing experience. Seems that as the janitor drags them to the altar, Patti (you remember, she’s the “special” one) strips naked and lies on it unbidden. Then the screen flashes red a few times, and the janitor is suddenly strangled by his own medallion, and all of the girls find that they can’t remember the last few minutes.

The next scene has the girls meeting a bum on the side of the road, asking directions to the sheriff’s office. The bum is the painfully-thin John Carradine, overshadowing all the other actors while still sleepwalking through his performance. Alas, this scene is pointless, as the girls get their information and make more sexual jabs at the bum’s expense.

The sheriff, as luck would have it, works from a secluded home office; his name is B.L. Bubb, and we instantly recognize him as the High Priest who initiated the janitor. (Wow, who could see that coming?) I should note that he’s played by John Ireland, an actor who had had a lot of western work before turning up in a string of Italian-made stuff; Satan’s Cheerleaders seems to have been his re-introduction to American cinema, and oddly enough he turned out to have a dully adequate career for the next decade. (Not that he’s a bad performer here, given the material he’s working with, but I’d think that a movie like this would be the last nail in most people’s coffins.)

Well, there’s a lot of other stuff in here, such as Mrs. Bubb seeing some great power in Patti that frightens her, and one of the girls overhearing their plan for a human sacrifice that night, and all of them escaping and running different directions, only to find out that (gasp!) everyone in the environs is a member of the sheriff’s cult. (Notable here is Sydney Chaplin at the tail end of his career, too obviously relishing his role as a Satanic monk.)

Blah blah blah, there are escapes and weird satanic happenings and a whole damned lot of chanting, and another pointless scene in which John Carradine shows he’s too good for this material, and then an ending with the semblance of a shocking twist — actually, two or three shocking twists thrown on together.

And then the wakka-wakka guitars signaled the closing credits.

There is so much wrong here, I don’t know where to begin. There’s not a soul among the protagonists who didn’t annoy me beyond belief. Rather than rooting for the cheerleaders or (Friday the 13th style) the bad guys, I found myself hoping for a Ceres-sized asteroid to wipe out the entire cast. (And the director.) And the dialog… the attempted jokes were like rejects from audition night at Evening at the Improv. Even those quips which, by comparison alone, seemed almost palatable were then struck back down by Greydon Clark’s unerring instinct for lameness. An example:

Sheriff: “That damned woman.”
Monk: “Yes, I know what you mean.”
Sheriff: “You? What do you know about women?”
Monk: “I’m very well read! And I dream a lot.”
Sheriff: “You what?”
Monk: “I dream a lot.”

See what I mean? Any possible humor is extinguished by overkill on the least funny part of the punchline. And that goes on for a full hour and a half, folks.

The worst of it is that Greydon Clark has been producing tripe of comparable quality on a consistent basis (about one movie every two years) since 1973, and apparently there’s no way to make him stop, short of an assassin’s bullet. This infamous resume includes Without Warning (1980), The Return (1980), Joysticks (1983), Uninvited (1988), Skinheads (1989), Lambada, the Forbidden Dance (1990), and Dark Future (1994).

Meanwhile, George Romero struggles to get funding for any of his projects. I tell you, there just ain’t no justice.

Some Notable Quotables:

“Don’t sap your strength, son! Remember your precious bodily fluids!”

- football coach

“Women! Marry them, make them a high priestess, give them all the power, and what happens? They become stupid and jealous!”

- Sheriff Bubb

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 3
• breasts: 4
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0 (windstorms, yes; thunderstorms, no)
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0