People are voting emotionally.

Nice effects though.

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

You can be sure that the panic in "Panic" was positively pathetic.Yep. Any sort of panic generated in this z-grade, Sci-Fi, "experiment-gone-wrong" picture was strictly bottom-of-the-barrel stuff and that rendered Panic simply worthless as viable entertainment.Any intended urgency or relevance in regards to the viral infection (which afflicted Prof. Adams and sent him on a murderous, flesh-eating frenzy) was truly laughable beyond words.I thought that it was totally hilarious when one minute the hideously mutated Prof. Adams was stalking victims in the very heart of the city and the next moment he was up to no good way out in the tranquil suburbs.I honestly don't think that a horror movie could possibly get much worse than this piece of garbage. Not only that, but this hunk of junk (which was an Italian production) contained the absolute worst dialogue dubbing imaginable.Unfortunately, the unintentional laughs in Panic were just too few and far between.Enough said.

Tonino Ricci strikes again! If I described Tonino as 'a poor man's Bruno Mattei' you'd know what I mean, right? And that certainly says something about Tonino Ricci (although I will add that Tonino doesn't steal footage from other films as far as I know). I've already watched Tonino's all-over-the-place-but-great 'Night of the Sharks', and his brain damaging action flick 'Days of Hell' (which is worth a look) and clawed my eyes out while waiting for something to happen in 'Encounters in the Deep'. Here, Tonino takes on the horror genre, throws in a mutated scientist and a mutated guinea pig, sets the film in England but films most of it in Spain. David Warbreck is an MI5 agent and Janet Agren is a buddy of the scientist now growling his way around England, and they're out to stop the guy before the government nuke the town where he's on the loose. Our mutated scientist turns periodically to tear people to pieces, well, at least that's what the cops tell us as we don't see much apart from some bloodied bodies. The (suspiciously Spanish looking) army turn up to lock down the town and the residents aren't happy. Can chain-smoking Warbreck and his nifty coat, and Agren and her nifty afro sort all this nonsense out? What do you think?Tonino Ricci films are a bit of a hard slog, and although parts of Panic are good (the mutated scientist was pretty groovy), other parts just drag and drag. I thought the film was almost over and then I realised it still had an hour to go. The shots of the obviously in a hangar but supposed to be flying army plane were hilarious, as was the usual sudden ending, but, as we're talking Tonino here, everything is filmed rather flat. It's okay if you're running out of Italian films to watch. I nearly forgot - the inter-cutting of English town footage with the army driving through a town in Spain was pretty funny too.

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.

Your standard "Frankenstein"esque mad scientist messing around with ill-advised covert bacteriological war experiments premise gets clumsily crossed with a similarly hackneyed crazed killer on the loose story with a dash of that old reliable standby of the deadly plague which could wipe out thousands of folks if it isn't nipped in the bud right away in this energetically cheesy and entertainingly slapdash grab-bag Italian sci-fi/horror thriller. An accident at a top secret government lab turns a professor into a hideously malformed, murderously deranged and seemingly indestructible humanoid beast with scraggly hair, an ugly, bloated, pus-oozing, skin-peeling boil-like face, superhuman strength, a horrid wheezy moan of a voice, and a decidedly antisocial sanguinary disposition. Worse yet, Mr. Unsightly Dementoid Freakshow has a highly lethal and contagious degenerative disease which forces anyone infected with said ailment to bag other people for their precious blood. Naturally, the ghastly mutant goes on a grisly killing spree in Great Britain, attacking a libidinous teenage couple doing just what you think in the back of a car, a lovely young blonde lady in the middle of taking a shower, the audience in a movie theater watching an asinine comedy, a plastered out of his skull drunk, and, best of all, even a priest (yes!). It's up to two-fisted man of action David Warbeck (who carries himself here with the same stolid austerity he brought to such Lucio Fulci flicks as "The Beyond" and "The Black Cat") and fetching femme doctor Janet ("Eaten Alive," "The Gates of Hell") Agren to stop the pitiably grotesque monster before things get disastrously out of hand. Sure, the basic plot is anything but original or inspired, but handy helpings of frequent violence, a grimly serious tone, Gionanni Bergamini's spirited direction, an unerringly fast and steady pace, and the wildly eventful narrative ensure that this baby remains a satisfyingly schlocky affair from start to finish just the same.