Remember back in school when you would get a tedious math assignment like long division or multiplication and instead of actually doing the work you turned to the trusty calculator and just wrote the answer in prompting the teacher to scribble across the top of the paper in red ink "show your work please". Well, Panic/Bakterion is the personification of that scenario in movie form and much like that math assignment I turned in it too will receive a big fat F.
Let's get this out of the way quickly. Yes, David Warbeck plays Captain Kirk with phasers on stunningly boring. The movie opens with two rats locked in mortal combat, an alarm sounding, and then some nameless individual screaming with green makeup on his face. This is supposedly how Professor Adams becomes Pizza the Hut or some monster that really resembles him. Another side effect of the contamination besides the resemblance of Italian cuisine is a thirst for human blood. At least this is what we are told as Kirk and the Professor's assistant Jane always manage to find the bodies after the fact. This entire film never once shows any visual "red meat" as all the kills are done either off screen or cut to another scene entirely. The monster even attacks a crowd of people in a theater watching the most mundane movie on earth (even worst than this one trust me!) before having the screen go black for some inexplicable reason. This gets old real fast.
Once the attacks start to increase in regularity the town starts to "panic" or to be more accurate become slightly agitated because a cabal of secret government agent don't want the virus to spread so they quarantine the entire village. Not once does anyone show any signs of infection from contact with Professor Adams as the government is planing to go ahead with Operation Q which is the eradication of the town populace. You think this would be important yet Kirk, who is in contact with the government agents, never relays this information to them. Stoopid! Instead he hunts down the beast with a fire extinguisher. You'll get what I mean if you watch. How this movie ends is so abrupt it's downright insulting. If you must watch this awful movie at the very least skip to the last two minutes. Otherwise quarantine Panic to the island of bad cinema.
