199. Panic

199. Panic (1982)
Director: Tonino Ricci
Writers: Victor Andrés Catena and Jaime Comas Gil
From: Chilling

A bioweapon infects a scientist in a small British town, turning him into a monster and leaving the city in quarantine. As the residents start to panic, they find themselves harried both by the monster and their own fears.

We open with lab rats attacking each other. Men in biohazard suits rush in, but one gets a facefull of some sort of chemical leaving smoking green lesions. The lab’s lead assistant is then talking to the head of the company about the importance of keeping it all a secret. Meanwhile, something stalks a couple making out in the backseat of a car and kills them both.

Captain Kirk (no, really, that’s the character’s name), is tasked by an intelligence agency to investigate the chemical spill and the seeming disappearance of the lead scientist. The chemical company, it turns out, only makes light pharmaceuticals like aspirin and whatnot as a cover for their multi-million dollar chemical weapons projects. Captain Kirk is paired with a local cop who’s leading the investigation into the murder.

More deaths happen and the cops notice that there’s no blood left behind. The higher-ups are getting nervous and so enact “Plan Q” where the entire town will be liquidated to prevent both the disease as well as information about it from getting out. The town is put under quarantine and has all telephone and broadcast capabilities cut off. Kirk now has a deadline to find either the doctor or a cure before everyone gets killed.

People in the town start getting antsy. They’re seeing people die, soldiers are surrounding the town, and no one is telling them anything. A long line of cars tries to challenge one of the blockades, but the soldiers shoot the lead car and scare everyone away.

Eventually Kirk and the cop figure out the doctor is traveling from point to point through the sewers and the assistant, being an idiot, keeps refusing to cooperate with Kirk, insisting that they don’t know the doctor is actually the monster or that he’s even infected. She eventually develops a cure for the disease, but it’ll take several hours to take effect and the plane carrying the bomb is already less than an hour away.

They find the doctor in the sewer, the assistant figures out where he’ll pop up and meets him there with the cure. Kirk shows up, though, and starts hosing the doctor down with a different chemical weapon that finally kills him. Just before time runs out, Kirk gets a message to London and the plane turns back. THE END.

The movie never decides what it wants to be. You have a monster movie with the doctor as some zombie vampire CHUD wandering the sewers, but he’s barely in the movie and only attacks about four people. There’s Kirk’s investigation which is played up as a mystery, initially, but is always kind of obvious. You have the townspeople gradually becoming aware of what’s happening and responding to the quarantine, but that’s only for one scene even though the movie’s called Panic. And on top of all of that, there’s the story of these high-level bureaucrats making the decision to murder an entire town of people rather than let the disease escape. There’s just too much going on.

That said, the movie still manages to be boring. You have all this plot, all this incident, but never any tension. Even though the final scene of the plane approaching the town with the bomb has a timer running in the corner, there’s no sense of impending disaster. It’s counting down from two minutes. You’d think that timer would continue to run as we see Kirk and the assistant trying to get the message to London, the higher-ups in London trying to get the message to the plane, all of it as the timer gets closer and closer to zero. Instead, the timer’s running, we see the pilots, and one gets a message calling the thing off with about a minute to spare. The movie never has a moment’s tension and so isn’t a recommend. The monster make-up, in the very end, is pretty good, but not enough to tip the scales to encourage anyone to see this.