PANIC (1982)
aka Bakterion
Article 4478 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-18-2014
Directed by Tonino Ricci
Featuring David Warbeck, Janet Agren, Roberto Ricci
Country: Italy / Spain
What it is: Monster on the loose.

A man infected by a plague virus has turned into a hideous blood-drinking monster. Can the authorities apprehend and destroy him before the government destroys the city in a cover-up?

What we’ve got here is you basic “monster on the loose” movie, and that’s something you don’t see too often from Italian cinema of this period. That gives the movie a certain novelty value. Unfortunately, that’s about all the movie has going for it. It’s a dreary, repetitive, barely plotted mess that just seems to rotate three scenes – monster attacks, investigations, government cover-up. You might get a snicker out of the fact that our hero is called Captain Kirk, and you may wonder why the police don’t wear gas-masks when they go into the sewers, especially since they know the fumes are poisonous. However, I will give the movie credit for pulling one thing off; when a young couple decides to go to a movie, the film they end up watching (which appears to consist of nothing but cars driving around while goofy music plays) looks even worse than the movie they’re in.