NIGHTMARE AT NOON (1988) **

If Mutant left you wanting to see another movie where Wings Hauser and Bo Hopkins team up to save a small town from a zombie outbreak, then Nightmare at Noon has you covered.  In addition to Video Vacuum favorites Wings and Bo, we have Brion James as the albino villain, Friday the 13^th Part 4’s Kimberly Beck as Wings’ infected wife, Laserblast’s Kim Milford as… well… somebody, and George Kennedy as the sheriff.  Now, I know what you’re thinking:  SHOULDN’T BO HOPKINS BE THE SHERIFF?!? WHAT THE HELL KIND OF OPERATION IS DIRECTOR NICO MASTORAKIS RUNNING?!?

The plot has Wings and Kimberly driving across the desert on their vacation.  Along the way, they pick up Bo hitchhiking and decide to stop off in a small town for some breakfast.  That of course just so happens to be the place where Brion James has tainted the water supply so he can monitor what happens when everybody turns into green-faced, kill-crazy, super-strong, mindless killers who bleed green and are annoyingly hard to kill.

Nightmare at Noon would make a good double feature with Mutant as it often feels like a sloppy remake of that flick.  It’s more like The Crazies than Night of the Living Dead and contains way more action than horror as the emphasis is on stunt work (there are shootouts, car chases, and motorcycle crashes aplenty), rather than the zombies.  Leave it to Mastorakis to take a fairly straightforward idea and make it just plain weird.  

Nightmare at Noon certainly has its moments, most of which come from watching the cast bounce of each other.  Hopkins’ knack of saying the word “shit” as three syllables is exploited to its fullest.  Although he and Hauser make for a great team, it’s hardly one of Wings’ best performances.  You know Wings is going to be a bit subdued in this one when one of his first lines is, “I hate microwaved croissants!”   

After an OK set-up and a chaotic middle section, the movie kinda runs out of steam in the third act.  Once the action goes beyond the town limits and Hopkins tracks James on horseback through the desert, the film becomes increasingly dull.  To make matters worse, Wings disappears from the last third of the picture and the elongated helicopter chase that serves as the climax is utterly pointless.

Still, this is the only movie I know of in which a doctor jabs an infected person with a tranquilizer and then blows on the syringe like a cowboy with a pistol, so it has that going for it.

AKA:  Death Street, USA.  AKA:  Maniac City.