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The dirty fallout from a dirty war, as simple as that. Canted angles for the Vietnam prologue, high on helicopters and low in the bamboo pit, a villager torched by a flamethrower tumbles in and is promptly devoured by American prisoners. The rescuing captain (John Saxon) is himself bitten and brings the malady home, what follows is a curious anagram of Rabid, with borrowings from Lolita and He Walked by Night and Antonio Margheriti's rollicking sense of systematic chaos. The veteran tries to quell his fascination with dripping meat but cannot resist nibbling on the nymphet next door (Cinzia De Carolis), trauma also takes the form of the estranged buddy just out of the psychiatric ward (Giovanni Lombardo Radice). (He's named Bukowski, after the man who wrote that "some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.") The friend heads to the movies and the conflation of onscreen violence and a couple necking in the aisle triggers the terrible urge, he's soon barricaded in a store surrounded by cops and viscera. "Some sort of biological mutation due to psychological alteration" is the official prognosis, contagion lights up wintry Atlanta locations with zesty splashes of chunky red. The dubbed Italian actor contemplating a puddle of splatter and calling Yankee Doodle's feather "macaroni" is typical of a surreal filmic language that later turns a bowling ball-sized shotgun wound into a silent-movie iris through which action is framed. The Deer Hunter is indicated, First Blood is anticipated. Down the sewer goes the apocalypse, "ashes to ashes and shit to shit," tomorrow belongs to fine young cannibals. With Elizabeth Turner, Tony King, Wallace Wilkinson, Ramiro Oliveros, and May Heatherly.
--- Fernando F. Croce |