Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Simon Nuchtern
• Written by William P. Milling
• Starring
  • George Kennedy
  • Richard Lynch
  • Karen Black
  • Claudia Udy
  • Lance Henriksen

I feel a little sheepish. Just last year I did a Lance Henriksen Video Binge, and yet I completely overlooked the fact that I had this one sitting on my shelf. Perhaps it’s an understandable lapse; despite the fact that Henriksen’s character is the hero, his name appears nowhere on the front or back covers, and I guess I just didn’t equate the description of Savage Dawn in his filmography with the misleading Rollerball-esque cover of the video I had.

Not that my life would have been greatly blessed by seeing the movie sooner rather than later. It’s a forgettable little post-Rambo hanger-on, brought to you by people who have apparently seen too many Westerns.

Fruit. It’s always the first casualty.

Henriksen’s bleached-blond character is named Stryker, and as with characters named Stryker, he is of course a one-man war machine, a tortured ex-soldier with too much blood on his hands. Can you imagine some kid growing with the the last name Stryker, and everyone in the neighborhood pretty much knowing how he’ll turn out? “My mom says I can’t play with you because you’re destined to become a violent but haunted badass.” (One of these days, just for the hell of it, I’m going to have a character named Stryker in one of my screenplays. Clarence Stryker. Career accountant.)

Anyway. We meet Stryker as he motorcycles through the desert, stopping for gas just long enough to get into an altercation with three motorcycle punks, who pull up mainly to get fresh with the Mexican storeowner’s pretty daughter. (Two minutes into the film, and already the cliches are being piled on so fast they threaten to topple and crush the long-suffering reviewer.) Thankfully, one of the punks is a generic cycle fiend. The other two, though, are the requisite Colorful Characters that you’ll never see in a motorcycle gang on this side of reality. One is an inbred-looking chap who wears a Nazi helmet and sunglasses 24-7, with the charming name of Meatrack (Charles Hyman); the other is the skinny comic-relief guy who wears a bowler, named Spyder (John Lisbon Wood). Stryker makes short work of them, with the aid of a convenient display of fresh produce.

Stryker makes it into the town he’s looking for, Agua Dulce, somewhere in the Generic Southwest. There he discovers Deputy Joe Bob (Lewis Van Bergen) who likes to prove his toughness by badgering the local retarded kid. He’s met by Katie (Claudia Udy), daughter of the friend he’s come to see, and given that she was apparently knee-high to a grasshopper last time he saw her, it’s probably inappropriate for her to crawl into his lap and give him a big soul kiss as soon as she lays eyes on him. But she does.

“No, we are NOT stopping for you to take another picture!”

The friend in question is Tick (George Kennedy), a wheelchair bound ex-vet who, like Stryker, used to work for “the Company” doing all sorts of covert, guerilla ass-kicking. Tick now putters around the town’s gold mine (toldja they saw too many Westerns), which went dead when the spring that watered the town dried up a few years ago. Oh, and he also still makes explosives and other armaments in his spare time, just in case, you know, they ever come in handy.

That night, Tick goes to great lengths to show Stryker that the entire town is full of the dregs of the gene pool. The Tomkat Bar is run by Rachel (Karen Black — and every time I see her, I realize with horror that people used to think she was sexy), where they have a “Tough Man” contest to see who can beat the shit out of everyone else. Current champion is none other than Deputy Joe Bob, who terrorizes his opponents with some weird “homoerotic psycho” shtick. (Oh, and the other deputy’s a dwarf. Just thought Andrew Borntreger would like to know.)

And it’s then that a couple dozen motorcycle punks calling themselves the “Savages” ride into town and really put the audience in a bind: Who’s less sympathetic, the worthless and cretinous locals or the worthless and cretinous gangbangers? The question is put to the test when Pigiron (William Forsythe, currently playing “Digger” on Fox’s John Doe), the gimp-legged leader of the Savages, sets his massive bruiser Big Zero (Mickey Jones, who’s made a career of playing supporting biker characters) against Deputy Joe Bob for the tough guy tournament. While the fight between two people we care nothing about goes on, let me update the roster of Colorful Motorcycle Gang Members You’ll Only See In Movies:

• guy with the Nazi helmet
• annoying and powerless comic relief in a bowler
• disabled young leader, who could never maintain control over such a ruthless bunch in the real world
• muscle man/side of beef
• glam rocker

(We also get a fleeting glimpse of one with, yes, huge horns on his helmet.)

“‘If you want my body, And you think I’m sexy…’ Hey, where’s everyone going?”

Along the way, we’re also introduced to Reverend Romano (Richard Lynch), the town’s clergyman and mayor. He’s pretty unimpressive as a holy man on two counts: for one thing, he’s played by Richard Lynch, which is a huge demerit right off the bat. For another thing, the man’s a walking hormone; no sooner does he get within pheromone range of one of the biker girls — named Lipservice (Wendy Barry), of all things — than he starts practically quivering with lust. (Had a kid like that when I worked at the group home; all he had to do was see a nubile teenaged girl, and he’d start hyperventilating and, no joke, his foot would start nervously tapping like Thumper during mating season. Wonder if he ended up entering Richard Lynch Divinity School.)

Anyway. Once the Savages win the match by cheating, the sheriff tries to break it up, and to show the Savages he means business, they throw Zero in the lockup. Which, of course, guarantees that the Savages are going to be back for blood. Oh, and bar-owner Rachel decides to skip out with Pigiron and Co. instead of run her business. I can’t think of a worse insult to the collective citizens of Agua Dulce.

All through this, Stryker’s been impassively observing from the sidelines. After all, he’s retired from the ass-kicking business, it’s not his fight, etc. (And I suppose he’d have a really hard time working up any sympathy for most of the townsfolk on parade. I know I sure did.) But things get personal the next morning, when Tick’s other kid Danny (Michael Sharrett) takes his little teen heartthrob for a ride on the four-wheeler, and naturally, the Savages decide to beat him up and try to rape her. (Bikers are up for mayhem by 7am? News to me.) Stryker just happens to be nearby, and beats up the half-dozen Savages on hand before the sheriff gets to the scene. So now, the bikers have it in for Stryker by name.

This year’s contender for Creepiest Clergyman.

(Excuse me while I stifle a yawn.)

The Savages try to take revenge on Stryker up at Tick’s mine, ever-so-courteously attacking one by one so that Stryker can easily defeat them, despite their novelty weapons. (One guy attacks with a power drill — one with a power cord. What the hell was it plugged into, the catering van?) But Rachel, who soooo wants to see the entire town destroyed (for no reason that’s ever explained), helps Pigiron get his hands on the weapons that can let him do it:

Tanks.

No, seriously. Tanks. Three green machines from the local National Guard armory, which is only guarded by two yokels who seem to be trying to one-up each other’s Jim Nabors impressions. Can one military vet, aided by his old buddy, defeat a coupla dozen cycle psychos armed with tanks?

No… at least, not without a helluva lot of explosions.

You know, my oldest son once tried to make a snack cake from a recipe. He put all of the ingredients into a bowl, plop plop plop, and expected them to mix themselves up and form themselves into a cake. I think that was pretty much the philosophy behind the making of this movie; they threw a lot of seemingly-good ingredients into a vat and expected a watchable movie to spontaneously generate itself.

No, this is not a “Glad you came to tea!” smile.

To make cliches work, you have to know why they worked in the first place, why the archetypes are powerful. Here, instead, they’re sketched in as lightly and quickly as possible: Tortured Vet, Disabled Buddy, Nefarious Gang Leader, Lust-Driven Preacher, etc. The characterizations couldn’t have been any shallower if each of the actors were earing a 3×5 card pinned to his/her shirt, telling what cliches they were supposed to be. Just about every performer is wasted, given nothing much to do except stand in front of the camera and occasionally throw things. Even the best of consummate professionals needs something to work with. (Lynch in particular is stuck in a subplot that’s both glaringly obvious and wholly pointless. Worse, we get to see him in his Fruit of the Looms. Black’s best scene, meanwhile, is a screeching catfight with Katie. Even for her, it’s just sad.)

The plot elements are all drawn from movies which in turn copied them from earlier movies, to the point that the biker gang is an uneasy combination of comic-booky EE-vil and onscreen cruelty that deserves more thoughtful treatment. Underscoring that, they had the audacity to put the standard “I don’t know who the bad guys are” speech in Stryker’s mouth halfway through. Really? You mean they haven’t made it as completely dyed-in-the-wool obvious? The Savages are drawn in such purple shades of pure meanness that they couldn’t appear more one-dimensionally evil even if they were each given a dastardly black moustache to twirl.

If there’s anything good to come out of the making of this movie, it’s that it was apparently the final feature from director Simon Nuchtern and writer William Milling (who together had previously given us such forgettable fare as Silent Madness). It’s good to see that, in some small arenas, a semblance of justice is served — the guilty parties never got to make another movie, and the semi-innocent cast members managed to continue their careers, such as they were and are.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 25
• breasts: 10
• explosions: 23
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• dwarfs: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
  • Richard Lynch (Rev. Romano) played “Arctus Baran” in the TNG two-parter “Gambit”
  • Charle Hyman (Meatrack) played “Lt. Konmel” in the TNG episode “Heart of Glory”
  • Monte Perlin (”Sledge”) did stunts in First Contact
  • Biff Yeager (”Biff”) played “Chief Engineer Lt. Cmdr. Argyle” in two first-season episodes of TNG (”Where No One Has Gone Before” and “Datalore”) before they realized that they needed the Chief Engineer to be a continuing character and gave Geordi that job for Season Two