Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by W. Merle Connell
• Written by George W. Sayre
• Starring
  • Mikel Conrad
  • Doris Merrick
  • Richard Monahan
  • Morgan Jones
  • Mark Lowell

When I found that this movie had been voted into one of the slots of Reader Revenge Month, I assumed it wouldn’t be too hard to get a copy. After all, practically every genre movie ever made has been re-released on DVD these days, and the cheaper ones sometimes find their way to DVD faster than the bigger classics. For one thing, everyone expects the seminal features like King Kong to have a boatload of extras, all of which take time to prepare; a cheap DVD of an equally cheap movie can get by without those frills. And the smaller and less significant a movie is, the more likely it’s lapsed into the public domain (or, just as effectively, copyright has passed through a string of successor companies until the copyright holder doesn’t know he has it).

Imagine my surprise, then, when I found that Untamed Women had never gotten to DVD, and had been out of print on videocassette for more than a decade. It’s especially odd because Untamed Women isn’t a completely unknown B-movie; the poster, for example, is currently available in reproduction from retailers like MovieGoods and is consistently for sale on eBay. Poster, yes; movie, no. Retromedia? Something Weird? Shouldn’t someone be leaping on this?

“Whoa — deja vu!”

Granted, having now seen the movie (acquired through, um, less copyright-observant channels), I can understand that no one is beset with a burning devotion to bringing Untamed Women to the 21st-century viewing public. It’s not a notably terrible movie, and it doesn’t even rank at the bottom of the “lost world of women” subgenre, but it neither exhibits nor elicits much enthusiasm.

In time-honored fashion, the entire story is a flashback, as a military colonel (Lyle Talbot — always a mark of quality) and an anthropological advisor (Montgomery Pittman) try to elicit the story of bomber pilot Steve (Mikel Conrad), who was picked up alone in the mid-Pacific with a brain-muddling concussion. After a liberal dose of an experimental truth serum, this is the story he spins them:

Out on a bombing raid (against an enemy who is never actually named — post-war sensitivity to the Japanese, or keeping their options open in case the Korean War spread across the Pacific?), Steve’s bomber is shot down, and his men bail out into two rubber rafts, one of which is immediately lost in the storm. That leaves the following survivors:

• Steve, the captain and our narrator;
• Andy (Morgan Jones), cornfed farmboy from Arkansas who can’t go four word without inserting a homespun colloquialism;
• Ed (Mark Lowell), who, we learn in a Stand By Me moment, went into the service mostly because of issues with his mother;
• Benny (Richard Monahan), whose position as Odious Comic Relief should instantly confirm for you that, yes, he’s from Brooklyn (he works Dodgers references into his dialogue almost as often as Andy mentions farm implements);
• “Shark bait.” (Well, technically, he was a survivor of the crash landing — then he died of injuries and was buried at sea.)

“Mind it? Nah — it reminds me of my old bachelor pad.”

After eight days at sea, the men drift up on the shores of an uncharted island. They gratefully nap on the grass, but awaken with spearpoints filling their faces, because the island — get this — is populated by nothing but women in that magical age range of 21 to 35. The men are imprisoned in a cave while the women try to determine what to do with them (a process which naturally begins with interpretive dancing). Steve instantly grasps the situation thusly: The women are living in some sort of timelost world, throwbacks from an earlier age. (Apparently he’s already seen a few of these movies.)

Meanwhile, high priestess and leader, Sandra (Doris Merrick), recommends immediate death for the men, who are guilty mostly of the crime of being men. In a comical display of the passion for democracy, every other women appears to be a stalwart member of the “Fish For Bicycles” party; they wanna keep the menfolk! The entire exchange is peppered liberally with “thee” and “ye” and “thou,” leading me to suspect that this is the first Quakers-only female paradise. It also highlights one of the most ignored rules of low-budget screenwriting: If you’re making a cheap movie, you’re going to end up with less experienced actors and actress, which means you really ought to write dialogue that can roll easily over a clumsier tongue.

The men are brought out for a hearing and don’t acquit themselves well, mainly by acting like idiots. Everyone from Steve down to (especially) Benny loads their speech chock-full with as many slang expressions as they can, making their answers to Sandra’s questions almost incomprehensible. That, and Benny tries to pantomime an airplane, complete with sound effects.

Once again confirming what we men think women do when we’re not around.

Sandra sends them back to their cave prison, then sneaks up and secretly releases them with a cock-and-bull story about showing them the way to get to safety. She also fills them in on the womens’ origins: They’re descended from Druid who left Britain when the Romans invaded. Well. That certainly explains the Jacobean English, doesn’t it? (It doesn’t explain why the high priestess has a name derived from Greek, but I suppose we have to have some mystery left in the world.)

It soon turns out that Sandra didn’t have the men’s best interests at heart when she set them on the path, as they’re soon attacked by — stock footage from One Million B.C.! (I will say, in this movie’s favor, that the stock footage is pretty well integrated with the newer material, at some points matting the old and new footage together instead of just cutting to the stock footage wholesale.) It takes several attacks — mammoths that look suspiciously like elephants with fake fur glued on, glyptodonts that look suspiciously like armadillos with extra spikes glued on, giant monitor lizards that look suspiciously like somewhat smaller monitor lizards — before the men finally decide to turn back and brave the women instead of the prehistoric animals. After all, how tough could a tribe of women be?

Especially women who are all hot for snuggle time. The soldiers meet a hunting party on the way back, and by the time high priestess Sandra catches up, the women have already called dibs on the grunts, and begun on the spongebaths. Sandra apologizes for trying to point them toward their deaths, but as she explains it, they have good reason to be suspicious of men. There used to be a thriving Druid community here (somewhat questionable, as except for a single stone altar, we don’t see a single human structure on the island); then, four years ago, the tribe of “hairy men” from the other end of the island attacked and killed everyone. The only survivors were Sandra and the young women in her charge at the holy temple high in the mountain.

“Man, if I have to complain to the neighbors about their pets one more time…”

Sandra tries to keep the men and the women separated, but her own charges ignore her and sneak back to the men’s sides. Boy, it’s a good thing these are man-hungry girls, because otherwise these guys would be striking out pretty decisively (what’s that, Benny? A Dodgers reference? Gee, thanks). Frankly, I don’t care how desperate a girl is, when Andy has you practicing milking an unknown animal called a “cow” on his thumbs, it’s time to take a break from the dating scene.

Sandra’s just about to read the Riot Act when — hey, hairy men! Yup, they choose this moment to attack for the first time in four years, and it’s only thanks to the soldiers’ pistols that they prevail temporarily. Steve sends Sandra to take the girls to the hidden temple (so well hidden, we don’t need to build a set!) while the men try to figure out a defense. And right about now, the volcano starts smouldering ominously…

“Volcano?!” What volcano? Where the hell did a volcano come from? I know, I know — if it’s a lost world movie, the Laws of Bad Movie Geology state that there must be a just-barely-dormant volcano hanging right over the area of human habitation, and the arrival of citizens of modern Western civilization will set it to rumbling. But couldn’t they have shown it earlier? Mentioned it? Pointed to it? “I love the smell of magma in the morning”? Something? Instead, here it is so late in the movie that it bears all the hallmarks of a screenwriter who realized that he had ten pages left and no conclusion in mind.

Presenting… the World’s Sneakiest Volcano!

Not to tell you the whole story (boy, a little late to make that decision, isn’t it?), but you remember that Steve was the only one picked up in the liferaft, right? Cataclysmic endings are par for the course with these things, but it’s uncommon to have an ending that’s such a complete downer. I tell you, if I had cared for any of these characters, I might have gotten depressed.

As it is, well, I didn’t have much of an emotional reaction to anybody at all. You may think that my synopsis glosses over the “good bits”; on the contrary, I think I punched it up considerably. Having few special effects besides stock wildlife and volcano footage, and being restricted in the jungle girl titillation they could get away with, most of the movie ends up being overly talky. That would be bad enough in a normal movie; here, three-quarters of the girls’ lines boil down to “I don’t understand what you just said, you stupid American.”

Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s one of Andy’s immortal pronouncements:

“You know, that Sandra gal has just about as pretty a fuselage as any four-motor job I ever did see.”

The girls, meanwhile, get lines like this:

“Thou art nice.”

Kind of hard to say who gets the short end of the stick there, really.

(Wait — that was me, the guy who paid twenty-five bucks to a bootlegger for the privelege of seeing this.)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: I was up to 22 when the volcano explosion threw me off
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 14
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Morgan Jones (Andy) played “Col. Nesvig” in the classic episode “Assignment: Earth”