Panik

Remember back in school when you would get a tedious math assignment like long division or multiplication and instead of actually doing the work you turned to the trusty calculator and just wrote the answer in prompting the teacher to scribble across the top of the paper in red ink "show your work please". Well, Panic/Bakterion is the personification of that scenario in movie form and much like that math assignment I turned in it too will receive a big fat F.

Let's get this out of the way quickly. Yes, David Warbeck plays Captain Kirk with phasers on stunningly boring. The movie opens with two rats locked in mortal combat, an alarm sounding, and then some nameless individual screaming with green makeup on his face. This is supposedly how Professor Adams becomes Pizza the Hut or some monster that really resembles him. Another side effect of the contamination besides the resemblance of Italian cuisine is a thirst for human blood. At least this is what we are told as Kirk and the Professor's assistant Jane always manage to find the bodies after the fact. This entire film never once shows any visual "red meat" as all the kills are done either off screen or cut to another scene entirely. The monster even attacks a crowd of people in a theater watching the most mundane movie on earth (even worst than this one trust me!) before having the screen go black for some inexplicable reason. This gets old real fast.

Once the attacks start to increase in regularity the town starts to "panic" or to be more accurate become slightly agitated because a cabal of secret government agent don't want the virus to spread so they quarantine the entire village. Not once does anyone show any signs of infection from contact with Professor Adams as the government is planing to go ahead with Operation Q which is the eradication of the town populace. You think this would be important yet Kirk, who is in contact with the government agents, never relays this information to them. Stoopid! Instead he hunts down the beast with a fire extinguisher. You'll get what I mean if you watch. How this movie ends is so abrupt it's downright insulting. If you must watch this awful movie at the very least skip to the last two minutes. Otherwise quarantine Panic to the island of bad cinema.

Tonino Ricci is certainly one of the worst Italian film-makers, also responsible of the terrible post-atomic romp "Rush". This one is a drwaback to "monster on campus" time : an infected scientist turns into a pizza-faced monster and terrorises (?) some bare-breasted starlets. A dubious hero tries to stop the contamination before the army nukes the whole town. In fact, the "bomber" is actually a (very) obvious model kit in front of some lava lamp impressions ! Ricci's no Argento or even Lenzi, but nobody could have done a masterpiece on such a no-budget. He did. Now, you take the same premise and turns it into a mega-bucks turkey like "Virus", and nobody is the merrier.

Panic is dreadful. I the only reason I watched it was to see David Warbeck and Janet Agren (with silly perm) and have a few laughs. Indeed the only thing one can do with a film like this is laugh. Chuckle at the attempt to match stock footage of streets in England with the streets of Spain. Roar with laughter at the cinema scene in which the lights go out and all we see is black for a good minute as the monster attacks the audience. Frown at the huge rat that makes an appearance in the sewer only to never be seen again for the rest of the film? There are so many goof in this film it is unbelievable, the best one has to be a Police Rover driving to the scene of one of the murders and the car which arrives is a Ford Cortina. Oh the pain of watching Panic, I still don't think I've fully recovered from the experience.

A professor has been exposed to some nasty virus, and the result is a slimy, toxic, rambling cannibal monster who lives in the sewers.David Warbeck is luring around as he usually does in low-budget Italian shockers. Oh, the military has put a quarantine on the small English town where the whole thing is happening, with plans about total destruction in fear of contamination. In one scene David Warbeck ask some character "have you seen any worse actors?". -And I can only give him a honest "No!" A very slow going film with few values.

I'm just going to get this out of the way first. Yes, the main hero in this movie's name is Kirk, and he's a captain in the army. So yes. they refer to him throughout the picture as "Captain Kirk". Now, to me, that's HILARIOUS. i had to rewind the movie just to make sure i wasn't hearing things. And there was even an officer named "O'Brien" later on in the movie. I'm shocked that the monster's name wasn't "Riker". But enough of the good stuff, let's dive into "Panic".

This movie is another on our awesome 50 chilling classics collection at number 26. Now i took a two week break at the halfway mark, and coming back, i'm not so sure WHY i came back. OK, if you looked at the top, i gave this movie a 2. So what's the big problem with this movie you may ask? One word. PACING. This movie's pacing is TERRIBLE. this 90 minute movie has a plot that could either have been resolved in 15 minutes but it also had the plot to stage an entire 90 minute movie if they did it correctly. Sadly, here, they did not. It's really sad when i understand more of the movie from reading the one paragraph DVD sleeve in my Box set, but that seems to be happening more and more with these movies. And this movie is no exception. on the DVD sleeve it says "A British research scientist is working with various forms of bacteria when he is accidentally exposed to a deadly variety due to a lab accident." OK. there are 3 problems with that sentence. 1. This movie is Italian, not British. But all the actors are dubbed British so they put in stock pictures of England. Why? I'm not sure. 2. No, i did not accidentally type "Variety" instead of "Virus" That is what actually was printed on my DVD sleeve. and 3. IT NEVER SHOWS YOU THAT IN THE MOVIE. in the film it starts out with some rats fighting in a lab, a guy grabs his face and that's it. i had NO idea what happened. and honestly, i STILL have no idea what happened.

Like i said though. This movie is S-L-O-W. it takes forever to make any point and while the movie has a relatively high body count, all kills are offscreen and in the dark. and they quickly cut away from any sort of interesting nudity. pff. this considers itself a monster mash film? There's at least 3 times in the movie where they could have stopped this monster dude but then...they didn't for some reason? and that just gives them an excuse to have lengthy scenes of them talking. um. yay? I really had to pull out the DS during this movie. it was more than i could do to pay HALF attention to it let alone ALL my attention. But i gave it a good go. i gave it 45 minutes of my undivided attention and there was so little going on i realized that i could do at least 2 more things at once and still know exactly what was going on. and you know what? i was right.

The ending is extremely abrupt with no time for an epilogue and the final scene just makes NO sense. i'm not going to give the ending away but i will say 5 words. "Fire extinguisher? What the crap?" With pacing that could bore Ben Stein, characters that are less enjoyable then a Disney channel sitcom line-up, and an ending more predictable than the ending to "The Village", Panic gets 2 melty faces, out of 10