Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Produced and directed by Peter Yuval
• Written by Michael Bogert and Peter Yuval
• Starring
  • Jay Richardson
  • David Scott King
  • “Michiko” (Michiko Nishiwaki)

My wife doesn’t share my appreciation for bad movies; normally, I watch my b-videos after she’s in bed. Every once in a while, though, she sits up with me to watch whatever I’m watching, and I guarantee on those nights my movie will be something so pitifully bad it’s not even fun to ridicule. The last time she did it was Aftershock, a pointless post-apoc adventure; this time, it was this pointless Highlander ripoff.

See, there’s this secret agent named Urbane who’s trying to get information from an antiques dealer by posing as his pilot on his charter flight and aiming the plane at the ground until he spills. But it takes too long, the plane crashes, and Urbane wanders away from the crash with no memory except some flashes of him fighting samurai in feudal Japan.

He soon finds out he was in some conspiratorial operation when suits come gunning for him. He also gains back more memories: Him being trained by a Japanese warrior-monk, the last of his sect, known to him only as “the Master.” Gee, but how could that be?

Turns out that the Master had the secret of immortality on a stone tablet. In the 1700s, Urbane was in Japan and tracked the Master down to become his apprentice, but then betrayed him by finding and reading the tablets. (Apparently that’s all you need to do. How he mastered written Japanese so quickly, I’ll never know.) Since then, he’s been immortal, wandering the world and doing odd jobs. His current odd job is to work for a shadowy mercenary agency, and his current assignment — wow! talk about coincidence! — find the Master and get the tablets for the agency’s client.

So we’ve got flashbacks, mysterious identities, a showdown between former comrades, katanas being flashed at guys with guns… Sounds just like Highlander, right?

WRONG.

Director Peter Yuval only has a couple of other equally unremarkable movies to his credit, and appears in this case to have been influenced most by those interminable early ’80s ninja movies. There’s none of the lyrical quality of Highlander, none of the bittersweet theme which made it a cult hit; instead, we’ve got lots of false suspense filling in between the sparse action scenes. The good guy’s got amnesia and his sidekick girl is fickle, but that’s OK, because the bad guys are just plain stupid. (Example: Urbane and sidekick-girl are at his apartment. The bad guys pull up out front. Six guys stand outside as two go in the front door; no one bother to cover the back.)

And because the budget is minimal, the flashbacks to Japan are represented by about three guys in historical costume running around in the woods.

To top it off, the ending resolves nothing — it’s not even a good setup for the sequel, it seems more like they just stopped.

Now, I knew that the movie probably wouldn’t yield anything great; I’d never heard of it, after all. Nevertheless, I was curious to see how bad an intentional Highlander ripoff could be, and I knew this video was in danger of ending up in the “previously viewed” bin real soon — and though I might rent it for 50¢, there’s no way I’d buy it for $7.

I’m happy to report that my curiosity has been assuaged. And had I known, I probably wouldn’t have blown by 50¢ on it either.