Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Armand Mastroianni
• Written and produced by Michael S. Murphey and Joel Soisson
• Starring
  • Maxwell Caulfield
  • Nichelle Nichols
  • Talia Balsam
  • LeVar Burton
  • Margaret Shendal

I’m glad that I’m not in the military. Aside from the fact that I have problems with rigid authoritarian structures and I don’t like the haircuts, I’d probably react to this movie by breaking out in hives. As it is, blissfully unaware of most of the specific ignorances committed, I’m only mildly annoyed/mildly entertained.

We open in the Civil War, where Confederate prisoners are being forced by the dastardly Union forces of the 44th (division? platoon? brigade? battalion? I dunno the proper terminology) to walk across a Confederate-set minefield to clear it, made all the more cruel by the inclusion of a small boy, Jeremy (Chad Sheets), who had been dressed in a Confederate uniform. Jeremy’s what an old timer has called a “special” child with some unspecified “gifts,” one of which is apparently the ability to avoid the mines that kill the dozen prisoners around him, despite shuffling his feet as if her were trying to generate some static electricity. He makes it to the far side of the field… and then the Union Commander tells him to walk back…

(I’ll just tell you now, no, we never do discover why the filmmakers decided to feature the Union as the bad guys.)

“Curses! Stymied by superior technology!”

Cut to the present, where two U.S. Army soldiers head into the country in a jeep to stake out an area, from the modern-day version of the 44th. As luck would have it, one of them is black and one is white, which means that the black one has to display his blackness by listening to his boombox loud (this is, of course, back when they were called “ghettoblasters”). The white guy is given no analogous “personality” bit, absence of melatonin apparently being characterization enough. It’s not like they matter much anyway; while they pound the stakes, the ground beneath them suddenly opens up, and both are dragged into the glowing fissure.

Having gone through two sets of Designated Meat players, we finally get to our main characters. Not that they’re any more palatable; it’s a troop (squad? unit? herd?) of eight recent recruits, being taken into the wilds for… um… some sort of training exercise or something. I guess. Anyway, notable among them is Ellis (Maxwell Caulfield — my wife is one of the seven living fans of Grease 2, so this bit of casting at least got her to walk in the room for 15 seconds), who qualifies for his Designated Hero status by running real fast. (He drops out of the back of the truck on a bet that he couldn’t catch back up and jump in.) The rest of the privates range from vaguely interesting — there’s the token female/love interest LeJune (Talia Balsam) and the Italian horndogger Cort (Bobby Di Cicco) — and completely uninteresting — well, that’s the others. Notable among them is the token black, Osgood, as played by LeVar Burton.

But that’s not the only Star Trek connection, as their gruff Sergeant Hawkins is played by none other than Nichelle Nichols! (Almost didn’t recognize her without a spark plug in her ear.) I don’t know who thought that Nichols was the perfect person to play the no-nonsense sarge, but I admit to taking a perverse kind of pleasure in hearing her curse like a sailor. ‘Course, if you got knocked back from Lieutenant to Sergeant, you’d probably swear too.

“Give it up, kid. I’ve met Captain Kirk, and you are no Captain Kirk!”

Frankly, I don’t think she’s tough enough on them. As I said, I don’t know the military, but I do know discipline, and these goons don’t have it. We’ve got whining, backtalking, lollygagging, drinking, smoking, sexual harassment, some attempted “fraternization,” shooting live rounds for fun, and falling asleep on watch. This is the part that has members of the US Armed Forces seeing red (this one, for example), and it didn’t impress little ol’ civilian me either. Frankly, I wouldn’t put up with this kind of whiny insubordination and lack of discipline from a troupe of Boy Scouts. Despite my bugger-all level of knowledge on matters military, I still know more than the yahoos who wrote the script.

Hiking into their area (supposedly the one that the earlier soldiers had staked out, though they never miss the stakes — come to think of it, nobody seems to miss the soldiers themselves), they fisrt encounter a mysterious woman (Margaret Shendal) in somehwat antiquated garb washing her face in a stream, then some spiked-log barriers such a the Confederates used to use in the Civil War (good thing there’s a knowitall along), and then a clearing (which looks just like the minefield from the prologue) where nothing grows and the ground is an odd yellow, as if some poor production assistant had hand-sprinkled sulphur all over. Opines Osgood, “Beings from an advanced world quite unlike our own landed here on Earth, shat, and left.” And coming from LeVar Burton, that just sent me into the giggles.

The offensive horndogger Cort, in the middle of making gestures at LeJune, falls through the rotted ceiling of a hidden underground Confederate bunker. No, he doesn’t kill himself, dammit. Ellis explores it briefly and finds a dessicated skeleton, but he doesn’t think this is worth mentioning to his commanding officer. Do I need to keep pointing out that this script was written from a position of matching ignorance and stupidity?

“No, I get to do the obvious Hamlet gag!”

Then the mysterious woman wanders into camp, eyeing Ellis. Her name is Melanie, and Hawkins doesn’t seem terribly concerned that a civilian can mosey into an area where ill-disciplined recruits are doing some sort of training exercise with live ammo in their guns. How do we know it’s live? Well, in digging a latrine, Ellis finds a skull — which Cort promptly props on a treeroot and shoots. He gets an easily ignorable talking-to from Hawkins. Ouch, watch it with those sarcastic tonguelashings, Sarge, you just might run afoul of the Geneva Convention.

Given that Hawkins is clearly all bark and no bite, it’s not surprising that Ellis and LeJune manage to share a kiss a little later, with Ellis getting only double sentry duty as a punishment (and LeJune getting no censure at all); it’s also no surprise that later into the night, drunk Cort forces his way into LeJune’s tent, and it’s only by holding his anatomy hostage with a knife that she gets him to leave. He leaves, wanders past the sleeping soldier now on watch (I think this these guys have now committed every military sin short of spitting on the flag and killing a four-star general), and manages to fall down another hole.

Hate to tell you this, pal, but a tent won’t stop a bullet.

And this time… Did I ever mention this was a zombie movie? It is, and there are undead Confederate soldiers waiting down there for him (and the body of the missing black soldier from the beginning, remember him?). Yay! Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving fellow! Now get out there and take care of the rest of ‘em!

Alas, it’s not to happen so soon. Instead, in the morning Hawkins gives them all another one of her ineffectual dressings-down — “I ought to put you all on report,” she says, though leg-irons would be more my choice — and sends three of them out to find Cort (or, in this case, his body).

And unfortunately, the radio’s having supernatural trouble, and the truck’s not due back to pick them up for another couple of days, so Hawkins has no choice but to rely on the world’s least confidence-inspiring soldiers to try and find out who killed Cort and why.

Giving a complete rehash of the plot any further might stimulate my gag reflex past the suppression point, so let me just say: Yes, Melanie is involved further, still drifting around the woods and staring beatifically whenever spoken to, though with a much more sinister agenda. And since they still haven’t managed to get out of dodge by nightfall, the end up bearing the brunt of a zombie soldier attack from the midst of the standard backlit blue fog (funny how dead soldiers using hundred-year-old ball muskets can outshoot fit young solders with assault rifles, ain’t it?). Oddly enough, the zombies are never shown full on, always obscured by fog or shadow — an especially odd choice given that effects wizard Mark Shostrom provided the zombies, and he’s always been one who delivers camera-friendly work (and the brief glimpses we get bear that out).

Melanie, Queen of the Dead.

Other artistic choices are even more puzzling. I still haven’t figured out the impulse that assigned the Confederates the role of underdog good guys and the Union the horns of Satan himself, and one would certainly expect more racial issues when Confederate ghosts encounter Union troops with two African-Americans among them (with a black woman in command, no less). Exposition comes late in the game, but it muddies the water more than clears it: we’ve got vengeance of the South on the North, plus a briefly-glimpsed and hardly significant reincarnation angle.

Rarely have I seen an American-made zombie films with characters more unsympathetic, or exhibiting such a dearth of grey matter. There were, despite appearances, things going for this movie: the story was set in such a way that a low budget wouldn’t show overmuch (all they really needed was two acres of woodlands, some period costumes, some army uniforms, and a few zombies), and the technical considerations really aren’t too bad; this movie was in the first fledgling wave of features intended specifically for a video premiere, and compared to, say, similar Wizard Video offerings (like Mutant Hunt or Robot Holocaust), it’s definitely a technically superior film. But none of that matters if the characters manage to alienate the entire viewing audience, either by technical inaccuracy or sheer preternatural stupidity. I wonder if some movie producers don’t think zombies are really that inherently scary, and so dumb down the human protagonists to make it a fair fight.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 16
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 7
• ominous thunderstorms: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
  • Nichelle Nichols (Hawkins) has played Lt. Uhura in several incarnations of the original series
  • LeVar Burton (Osgood) has likewise played Lt. La Forge in several incarnations of The Next Generation
  • Jessie Lawrence Ferguson (the boombox soldier) played “Lutan” in the TNG episode “Code of Honor”
  • Gary F. Bentley (”Union Soldier #3″) was a special effects technician on Star Trek 2