Pânico

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.

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.

Panic is a lame monster on the loose tale that suffers from a number of flaws, ranging from obvious production goofs to a terribly paced ending. Its basic premise is that a failed scientific experiment turns a scientist into a blood drinking monster while simultaneously unleashing a deadly virus (although how the virus factors in is something of a mystery, as we see no signs of an epidemic.)

The most comic aspects of the film are how its claim to be set in England clashes with the Spanish / Italian production. For instance, the police and military featured in the film wear Italian style uniforms. Furthermore, large sections of the dialogue are clearly dubbed in. These comic elements are the most enjoyable parts of the film.

Unfortunately, the film's drawbacks more than match its comic value. The monster itself is poorly done, with bad make up and obvious gloves standing in for its hands. The pacing toward the climax is lethargic, so that I had to fast forward out of boredom. Furthermore, you'll be able to guess what happens several minutes in advance.

Because of an accident in the laboratory of a British chemical company simply named Chemical which joins the government's so-called Prurima Plan, one of the leading researchers, professor Adams, becomes a fresh-eating monster, and attacks a local teenager couple of Betty and her boy friend, Lucas. And then, the government decides to order the RAF to use the mass-destructive weapon... Although I believe I am one of the Italian-horror-film-lovers, I have to say this Italian film is as sadly bad as the notorious MIAMI GOLEM. The story of the film seems to be trying to express the biological and/or chemical crisis of the city of Newton where the ex-professor monster is, but the film itself has no tense atmosphere from beginning to end. And the pizza-faced monster effects which created by Rino Carboni are not only simply cheap but also problematically unrealistic; at least his face seems to be too swollen to eat raw human fresh. And to make matters worse, this film has, as other reviewer already pointed out, not a few badly independent and almost meaningless scenes. For instance, in the first one third part of the film, Captain Kirk and Sergeant O'Brien find a giant pizza-faced mouse in a manhole of the old factory, and the Sergeant says OH, MY GOD! And that's all there is to it. Since then the composite-photograph-like mouse never shows up, and no one mentions it. In addition, this film has NIGHTMARE-CITY-like crazy credits; at the very ending part of the film, with the cheap TV-like music by Marcello Giombini, one can see WHAT YOU HAVE SEEN MIGHT REALLY HAPPEN...PERHAPS IT ALREADY HAS!