Panic (1982)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

A Brilliant Conflict

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

I have to give full marks to an Italian movie, set in a small town in England, that starts off with infected experimental rats going amok in an aspirin-manufacturing company's laboratory, then straight to two of the monster's first victims having sex in a car--all in the first five minutes. That's fine pacing for a low-budget film. It was certainly enjoyable and a fun watch--too bad the film was uneven, and that breakneck (pardon the pun!) pace of its start couldn't be maintained. An intriguing premise, of a clandestine germ-warfare experiment gone awry, and both the government and police being in on the ultimate 'Plan Q'--destroying all life (people and animals) in the city--claiming it's 'better to kill 1,000 early than have to kill 1,000,000 later'.With the right budget for makeup and acting, and in the right screen writing and directorial hands, this could have really been something, far more than the 'so-bad-it's-good' territory 'Panic' holds. I thoroughly enjoyed the attempt, however--the homages to 'Psycho', 'The Third Man' and other great films really brought a smile to my face. Movies like THIS, in which the ambition far outrun the result, are ones that should be remade, in my humble opinion.

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.

A laboratory experiment goes terribly wrong leaving a scientist, Professor Adams, radioactively infected with a horrible mutation effecting his whole body. Now a grotesque cannibal lurking the underground sewer tunnels of the town of Newton, the powers-that-be are planning to drop nerve bombs if the monster isn't found and killed in time, so that the viral contagion Adams is currently carrying will be contained. If this drastic decision is to be halted, Captain Kirk(David Warbeck), Adams' lab assistant Jane Blake(Janet Agren), and Newton's Police Sergeant O'Brien(José Lifante)will have to race against time to find the mutated fiend and save thousands of innocent lives. During this chase to find it, the monster is scouring streets targeting citizens, feasting on flesh, retreating to the sewers periodically to escape from harm. Rampaging through a theater, it finds a female as others flee, tearing away at her face right before Kirk is able to catch him. The monster breaks into the locked door of a Catholic church, invading a sacristy as a priest helps his choir boys find escape, murdering him as the padre defends his kids. Kirk's boss, Milton(Franco Ressel)unloads two shot gun blasts into the beast before it rips away at his leg. Even Kirk is able to unload an entire gun of bullets into the thing without downing the monster. This monster has quite a threshold, as Kirk and O'Brien flood the sewers with gas hoping to corner it after sealing off escape routes. That monster is damned elusive, that's for sure, quite motivated to keep on going, no matter the resistance it faces along the way.The version I watched, on a 50 pack of Mill Creek films, is incredibly murky and seems to be cut. The movie's absent of gore and the monster itself is wisely hidden in darkness, with only mutated(..latex)flesh made visible as light briefly flashes on it while in pursuit of new victims to eat. I didn't think the monster is very convincing when the film finally unveils it at the end. I won't lie, this was a pain to sit through;positively boring, with an absence of thrills. If the plot were even remotely original or effective, I might've enjoyed it more. On paper, this hybrid of suspense elements(monster on the loose eating folks;threat of spread virus;possible nuking of town)should be a winner, but under the direction of Tonino Ricci, it plods along at a languid pace covering familiar ground formerly trampled on by more capable filmmakers. In the version I watched, the scenes of violence disappear from the screen as the monster often engulfs the entire frame. Even as Kirk and O'Brien survey the crime scene carnage left in the monster's wake, Ricci fails to give the viewer the gory goods. Just a sheer disappointment that, if handled by someone else, might've been better. An Italian production with the story set in England(why not Rome?).

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!