Nightmare at Noon

 Nightmare at Noon is a low budget, very very eighties action/horror movie- more action than horror, about a town infected with the rage virus.

 As far as eighties B-movies go, this is strictly mid-to-low tier, but it isn't a complete waste of time either. It's very much of its time, and not something that needs to be rediscovered or anything: It's cheesy, clumsy, lacking in any depth, and nothing that happens quite makes sense, but it does offer some amount of coolness. I'd never heard of it, despite it being very much the sort of thing I'd seek out for most of my life; I think younger me would have liked it a lot.

 Things kick off with that most nefarious of the alphabet organizations -the EPA- messing around near a town's water supply with their futuristic computers and tech and machineguns (!). That they're up to no good is made clear when a charming local yokel drives up and tries to engage them in friendly conversation and gets shot right in the beard. And everywhere else.
 Then the head EPA guy, an albino played by (non-albino in whitehair) Brion James, shoots some green gunk into the water, and officially kicks off the experiment on his computer.

 We then cut to Ken (Wings Hauser) and Cheri Griffiths (Kimberly Beck), a married couple of 80's stock characters on a holiday cross-US camper van roadtrip where of course they seem to spend all their time quarreling and being a smartass to each other. They pick up a hitchhiker called Reilly (Bo Hopkins) who's too suave by half, and head to town for breakfast.

 At the diner a seemingly sweet redneck suddenly turns murderous - he stabs a waitress with a knife, and then starts attacking everyone. This is a great scene because Ken, the urbane lawyer, tries to stop him and gets his ass handed to him. Then Reilly, who had been hanging back, playing it cool, goes up to the berserk yokel, gets a couple of good hits in... and then gets his own ass kicked! Good subversion of expectations, movie. Don't expect much of  that sort of thing, it's pretty much a one-time show of cleverness, but it's much appreciated.

 Reilly ends up shooting the... fuck, let's call him a zombie, because that's pretty much what he is* - in any case, he shoots him in the knee, which explodes in green blood. Whatever the EPA put in the water, it acts pretty fast. In typical b-movie fashion, no one seems to think that merits freaking out over.

 The sheriff (George Kennedy!) joins the action, along with his police officer daughter Julia (Kim Ross) just in time to explain that regular people are going insane all over town. Ken and Cheri decide to bail out, but their motorhome is stopped dead when the evil EPA operatives activate an EMP-like plot device that stops all cars heading outside of town; So they have to go back and join the non-infected survivors to try to formulate a plan... to... well, it's not clear what they're trying to achieve. at least not until they work out what's happening and get an actual goal they can work towards later on.

 There's some fun scenes as chaos breaks loose, but not as much as you'd hope for, I imagine due to budget constraints, but also because there's a lot of extraneous drama with these very basic characters that the script seems to think we give a single shit about. Stuff happens and there's a lot of wheel-spinning, but don't expect much in the way of interesting developments, sense of fun... or even basic common sense.

 On the other hand, in the best tradition of 80's low budget nonsense, it does pack in a lot of cool stuff.
 There are a ton of stunts, many of them minor, plenty pretty impressive - and quantity does matter in this sort of thing. There are also a lot of explosions, long loving shots of people using flamethrowers, and a whole lot of shooting. The action is... pretty standard for non-asian 80's action; people take turns shooting at each other, and every now and then someone on the other side gets hit; Nothing too exciting. The car stunts fare a lot better: this is the sort of movie where the tiniest fender bender can set off a huge fireball.

 The final act takes place in the desert, complete with horse chases and the incredible beauty of the Arches national park; it turns into a western for a while as the EPA spooks head for the mesas.

 There is also a completely extraneous but legitimately cool helicopter chase intercut with the finale, and that's the one thing this movie knocks out of the park. I especially love that missed missiles still manage to hit a vehicle randomly parked out in the middle of the desert... not once, but twice! Awesome.

Lizard brain comfort food

 The sound mix deserves special mention, because it adds a hell of a lot to the cheese factor in the movie; everything gets its own distinct sound effect. A cursor blinking on a screen? Beep! Beep! A futuristic crossbow thing being reloaded? Schwing! And so on. It's pretty funny; I hope the foley artist got a good paycheck out of it.

 The music, composed by Hans Zimmer (!) with his mentor Stanley Myers is of the unmemorable crappy synth variety, intrusive and obvious, and nowhere near as catchy as their awesome earlier work on The Wind. It does reference a couple of classic western soundtracks on the finale, which is cute.

 So... yeah. If I had seen this as a teen that helicopter chase, along with the abundance of squibs, the horror-ish tone and Kim Ross - I'm pretty sure I'd remember the movie fondly. These days I'm much a little pickier, but I can definitely still see the appeal.

*: The zombies in this film are pretty high-functioning, and [spoilers] can apparently be healed, so purists may disagree.