Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Lance Lindsay
• Written by Lance Lindsay and Eric Woster
• Starring
  • C. Juston Campbell
  • Faye Bolt
  • John Smith
  • Taylor Kingsley
• Produced by Robert Badger, Thomas Frantz, Charles Linza, Don E. Porter, Frank Rhodes, and Eric Woster

I picked this up for $2 in a previously-viewed bin.

I got gypped.

Starring no one you ever heard off, this anti-epic tells the Alien-ripoff story of a team of routine explorers on Mars who wear pathetic garage-sale space suits (when they take them off, you can tell that the helmets aren’t locked in to anything — they’re just sitting on the collar.) They find a curious rock and take it aboard their shuttlecraft. It opens when no one’s looking, revealing a giant quartz crystal which drips goo that becomes a tiny slug creature with bulbous eyes.

Next thing we know, the computer is chanting that the air supply is at a critical level — but by the time the computer decided to tell anyone, the entire crew is already slumped over dead.

Two months later, the shuttle comes it to space station Alpha 7, and a repair crew goes aboard to (one presumes) restart life support before an investigation (again, one presumes — the bodies have all been removed, but apparently no one thought to remove and examine the big glowing crystal). The space station explodes a few minutes later (due to completely unrelated circumstances involving shoddy subcontractor work), leaving them adrift. (Funny: The emergency klaxon sounds, and everyone just stops and looks at each other for a full ten minutes. Guess those emergency drills didn’t work, ‘cuz no one has a clue what to do!)

According to the computer, it will take eighteen months to reach earth (because it’s a shuttle, not a real starship). Apparently no one thinks to radio a real starship to come find them — instead they plan to stop at a supply depot in five days to store up on food and fuel.

But wait — there’s that creature! And it starts killing with reckless abandon, using its tentacles (you know the drill — graps wrap the actor in tentacles, pull them off, run the film backwards).

Now, let me tell you: This shuttle has got about five rooms, and they’re all connected by tunnels. Round tunnels about three and a half feet high. Whenever you want to get anywhere, you crawl through a tunnel. If you need to take, say, a box of rations or a lantern to another part of the ship, you have to push it in front of you while crawling. Looks like they went with the lowest bidder to design this goofball ship.

I won’t subject you to what I went through — suffice it to say that three of the five crewmembers are dispatched in quick succession, then the remaining two (the guy and girl who hate each other, naturally) spend most of the rest of the movie doing nothing, locked in the command center. Listening to the music.

Oh god. The music. Imagine the worst mid-80s meditation-style New Age crap you ever heard, add some of the worst mid-80s synth elevator music, and you’ve got the soundtrack. I’m pleased to report that Doug Katsaro, the “composer”, didn’t have another job until 1995, when he composed music for The Tick TV show.

While we’re at it, I’m also pleased to note that both the director and the writer each did only one other project before disappearing off the face of the earth, and that most of the cast never did anything else — with the notable exception of Tracy Scoggins, who has one line near the beginning of the movie (in the first crew that bites it). Every one of the repair team apparently has two modes: Belligerent and not.

In the beginning, I was comparing this to an Ed Wood movie, but Ed was far superior.
- The dialog started out bad (as in Ed Wood bad), but then just became boring (which one could never accuse Ed of).
- You know how to make a wall look futuristic? Hang a techno-device (piece of styrofoam, lid of a cooler, etc.) on it, right? These ones were all hanging crooked to each other.
- Solid bulkheads obviously shuddered when non-special effects were going on. Blah all around.
- Shipboard computers proudly displayed their 5 1/4″ floppy drives.
- They encounter a meteor storm, which turns out to be a handful of really big rocks that bounce off the hull like a baseball, with no damage.

In the end, after this interminable non-suspense, we find out — hey! The alien’s a nice guy! It was just scared, and it’s all a big misunderstanding! It tapped into the ship’s computer and accessed the Bible. That’s right, it reads the “Be nice to each other” statements from the New Testament, and that’s all there is to it. We finally get to see it, and… Ugh. Imagine a five-year-old’s drawing of ET’s face, made out of translucent orange rubber and stuck on a long neck and slug’s body. Pathetic.

But that is not all — then we’re treated to a ten-minute montage of the crewmembers and Gar (that’s the alien’s name) getting along famously before we finally role credits!

Oh, yeah — the crystal itself? It’s Gar’s computer, which teaches him and allows him to access the ship’s computer. I don’t know how it warranted getting the title to itself, but then no one else really deserved it.