Took a chance watching this one and it paid off at first. Went in blind and I see the names Wings Hauser, Bo Hopkins and George Kennedy - legends! An incredibly bad rip-off of The Terminator's title card is swiftly followed by a hillbilly being killed by a scientist with a laser gun. Oh, it's gametime.
Too bad the opening scene might've been the best one.. So evil government dudes (who look like a bunch of plumbers) taint the water supply of a small town with a chemical that induces psychotic rage and turns you into a green zombie. All this is part of an experiment of some kind that is never explained. The baddies shut down all communication in-or-out, trapping the citizens in for the battle royale.
The main scientist bad guy looks like a Col. Sanders / Doc Brown hybrid who's suffering from radiation sickness. He has no characterization besides being a (literal) mustache twirling villian... only a cool laser gun and sunglasses. The good guys are an unlikeable lawyer, his snotty wife, a renegade drifter, the town sheriff and the sheriff's deputy. They also serve almost no purpose, just props running around from shootout to shootout.
The experience is saved by B-Movie goodness all around: Horribly outdated 80s future tech and SFX, bad dialogue being delivered poorly, tons of gratuitous violence and inexplicable explosions. The plot doesn't matter and all the characters are uninteresting, but luckily it moves quick enough to offset boredom. After a few minutes of watching paint dry you'll be treated to either some delightful overacting, horrific violence, or one of the seemingly hundreds of van explosions in this movie.
It's funny that Hollywood go-to Hans Zimmer did the score here. It helps the movie, but is dated, and doesn't stand above it much in quality. It also is very Terminator inspired, essentially mirroring it at times.
By the end it falls off the rails and devolves completely into a bad western (The weird government CIA scientist dudes all decide to ride horseback for no reason!). There's also a very boring and pointless helicopter chase tacked on after the plot concludes. So all in all it's nothing special, but worth checking out for the right crowd, especially all the George Kennedy fans out there
