Panic

Panic (1976)

Pay close attention to my synopsis and please forgive me if it doesn’t make much sense, because the movie doesn’t either. A doctor is exposed to a virus that turns him into a monster. He prowls the streets killing everyone he can find. The military, concerned about the infection spreading decides to use nerve gas to kill everyone in town. Luckily they allow the only man they have in town to take a day to track down and kill the scientist before they gas everyone. This is their plan after they acknowledge that everyone that could have been infected by the scientist has been killed by him, so there isn’t much danger in the disease spreading! The “hero” Captain Kirk (not kidding) manages to kill the scientist before they are all gassed and the movie ends.

The plot to this movie is paper thin and poorly thought out. As I stated above in my synopsis there isn’t any thought or logic put into the deadline of the town being gassed. Additionally plot devices are hastily thrown together to explain the unexplainable, like the presence of underground tunnels that allow the monster to pop up everywhere he wants to. One of the characters actually says out loud, “Oh yeah the monster and I are the only ones who know our way around down here.” If that were true then how come you didn’t think of the tunnels earlier? The movie is also guilty of the oldest trick in the book when you don’t have enough story to fill up a movie. Show scene after scene of people driving and walking. All of this without any bothersome dialogue to clutter up the scenes. But as bad as the script it can’t cover up how bad the acting is. It seems to me that everyone was either there for a paycheck or never expected the movie to see the light of day.

The technical bits of filmmaking aren’t much better than the story and acting. Of course it isn’t unusual for a movie like this to be dubbed, but this is one of the worst dubbing jobs I’ve ever seen. There is little effort to add any ambient sounds in the background, so the entire movie has this sort of surreal feel to it. Additionally the movie is poorly light and shot. You have long uninteresting shots of cars coming towards the camera, followed immediately afterwards by shots of it driving away. While the print that I watched wasn’t very good I could still tell that many of the scenes were too dark to see the action. But then considering the shoddy makeup job on the creature maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.

This is a bad movie that simply isn’t worth anyone’s time. If you insist upon checking it out I got my copy on one of the 50 packs from the fine folks at Mill Creek. Check them out at http://www.millcreekent.com/

½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer