Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Peter Svatek
• Written by Mark Sevi
• Starring
  • Roddy Piper
  • Jayne Heitmeyer
  • Billy Drago
  • Tyrone Benskin

I have to admit: Rowdy Roddy Piper is one of my guilty pleasures. The best of the wrestler-turned-actor crowd (granted, that isn’t saying much), Piper has a relaxed on-screen demeanor and a natural amiability around which most of his roles are built; he may not be Olivier, but he’s got a rough-hewn charm that’s just plain fun to watch. Billy Drago, on the other hand, was born a natural bad guy. His hooded eyes and languid acting add up to a positively reptilian persona; watching him perform holds the same sick fascination as watching a snake swallow a gerbil whole.

So when a movie starring both of them comes up blah, you know it must have a lot working against it.

We begin on Lunar Base 4 Correctional Facility, where (under uncannily normal gravity) Adrian Dunn (Drago) gets into an altercation with another prisoner over a cigarette. Using available power tools, Dunn cuts open his sick-looking companion, causing green bile to spurt from his abdomen. As Dunn bends over the body, a little critter that looks like one of those gum-machine gummy octopuses bursts from the corpse’s face, landing in a wound in Dunn’s arm. Dunn is rushed to the infirmary, but dies soon thereafter.

Meanwhile, in Boston, Officer Cameron Grayson (Piper) gets himself into an altercation with some street hoods he’s supposed to bring in. His captain tries to bust his balls over his failure, but Grayson’s got a trump card: He’s a “Black Shield” cop, which makes him part of an elite squad that gets to assign their own cases, ignore their commanding officers, etc. I really can’t see the logic behind empowering such officers and then spreading them one-to-a-precinct; as one character says later, “Sounds like a cop’s wet dream.” It also makes all of the requisite “fighting with the captain” scene pointless — we already know Grayson can do whatever he wants, so why’s the captain even bothering?

I probably ought to mention that it’s also “Econight” — over 80 days ago, some volcano went off and spewed enough dust into the atmosphere to cause blackness 24-7 and an effective nuclear winter; there are some lights set up to maintain circadian rhythm, but other than that it’s just a lot of night shooting. How does this affect the plot? In no way that I could tell — aside from being a really elaborate form of dinosaur repellent, there’s little need for it in the story. (Perhaps it was to justify all night shooting, to disguise the fact that “Boston” is actually Montreal.)

So Dunn’s body bag is shipped back to Boston for an autopsy, but en route Dunn revives, breaks out of the spaceport, and wanders the city, becoming steadily grosser as the organism takes over his body. He also takes to raping women at random, who then become infected as well. Oddly enough, his victims run their course much faster than he does; his first victim explodes with little octopus critters in about 24 hours, whereas Dunn keeps wandering around for the length of the movie.

Naturally, when Grayson gets Dunn’s description from the rape victim, he goes ballistic; not only is Dunn supposed to be dead, but Grayson’s the one who put him in prison, and apparently it’s a personal thing. (We get the backstory later.) Also naturally, Kirbie the virologist working with the rape victim is young and pretty, and she goes through the whole “antagonism to attraction” process with Grayson. (After all, who can resist his boyish charm, not to mention the heavyhanded musical cues?)

Big problem: For most of the movie, Dunn wanders around the city, raping women and calling them “Katie,” while Grayson and Kirbie try to figure out what the infection is and how to catch Dunn.

The explanation for the organisms doesn’t help things: Apparently, it causes the infected to breathe out methane, and the brilliant scientists figure it was bioengineered by aliens, to terraform our world into something habitable for them. No mention is made of how the first prisoner was infected, or why the organism uses such a patently inefficient method of tranmittal (sexual contact), or why the breath of a few infected people is going to make more difference than herds and herds of methane-belching cattle that we’ve been keeping for hundreds of years. (Maybe the aliens convinced us to like beef. Maybe they started the Hindu religion. Who knows.)

So Grayson uses the smalltime hood from the first scene to put out feelers for Dunn in “Little Beirut” (you know, the bad part of town — seems like by 2009 Beirut should be a really dated reference), and there are shootouts, and Dunn seems to be impervious to bullets, and even when he’s killed he gets up again and wanders around Boston some more. And we finally get the backstory: Dunn used to be a cop and Grayson’s best friend, and they were both in love with Katie, and when she married Grayson, Dunn raped and murdered her. Oh, and of course, Kirbie looks like Katie, enough so for 1) Grayson to be attracted to her, and 2) Dunn to get fixated on her, prompting the final confrontation.

All in all, it’s a melange of elements that don’t quite fit together, and the fact that Dunn starts talking with Cookie Monster grammar as the infection progresses just makes it sillier. (Apparently the aliens don’t like articles or conjunctions.) And not even Piper’s laid-back charm can hold it together.

All right, I’ll tell you the two cool things in the entire movie:

- To get a composite sketch from the first rape victim, the police use a computer which scans her face as she looks at flashing images on the screen; it reads her subliminal, unconscious reactions to the images and comes up with an accurate portrait.

- There’s a dildo-shaped knife… Okay, maybe there’s only one cool thing.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 12
• breasts: 5
• explosions: 3
• dream sequences: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
• (actors who appeared in Zombie Nightmare: 2 - the horror!)