Also known as Bakterion, Nightmare Killing, and even Zombie 4 in Greece, this film was directed by Tonino Ricci under the pseudonym Anthony Richmond—the same guy who served as Lucio Fulci’s assistant director on White Fang and Challenge to White Fang before giving us A Man Called Rage, Raiders of the Magic Ivory, Encounters In the Deep, Night of the Sharks and Cave of the Sharks.
It all starts with lab rats going nuts and killing one another, which was not what I was planning on watching while I ate my morning eggs. What was I thinking? Never turn on an 80s Italian bio-hazard movie before your first cup of coffee.
Professor Adams (Jose Lifante, Dagon, The Loreley’s Grasp) has gone missing—maybe he took off on an impromptu fishing trip, but we all know he’s actually patient zero behind all the random bloody carnage. Naturally, the government doesn’t call the CDC; they literally send Captain Kirk (David Warbeck, fresh off playing Mac in Fulci’s The Beyond) to figure out what’s going on.
Warbeck immediately starts working with Jane (Janet Agren, Eaten Alive!, Hands of Steel, City of the Living Dead) to figure out how to stop the infection and save not just the small town, but soon the entire world. Yep, there’s plenty of heavy-handed exposition about how this mutant virus could end life as we know it, yet all we actually see for most of the runtime is one rotting, meatloaf-looking doctor stumbling around the woods.
Will the military end up nuking the town? Can Captain Kirk stop the absolute worst special effect you’ve ever seen this side of Curse of Bigfoot? Will Jane feel genuine sympathy for the professor, whose face looks like the inside of a stuffed pepper left in the oven until Tuesday? And did I laugh out loud at the end-credit copy: What you have seen might really happen…perhaps it already has!
You bet I did.
