It's like I'm sitting here waiting for something to happen to me, only I don't know what it is.
It's been a couple months since I watched one of my "Chilling Classics," so today I went straight for the hard stuff: 1978's The Alpha Incident. How did I know it was going to be so bad? Five words: "A Film by Bill Rebane." Nothing strikes fear into the hardiest of bad movie buffs quite like them.
Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 will know Rebane as the guy who gave us Monster A Go-Go (which was completed by Herschell Gordon Lewis when Rebane ran out of money) and The Giant Spider Invasion (which would go down as the worst film ever made in Wisconsin if he hadn't kept making them). The Alpha Incident was Rebane's attempt at an Andromeda Strain-type thriller about an alien microorganism that kills every living creature it comes into contact with -- and in an extremely grotesque manner to boot. Instead of sticking with the scientists working around the clock to find an antidote, though, Rebane and writer Ingrid Neumayer (who also co-wrote The Legend of Bigfoot with him the following year) repeatedly strand us for long stretches of time with the five people quarantined at a remote Wisconsin train station, all of whom don't take long to get on each other's and the audience's nerves. (Sadly, that number gets whittled down to four fairly quickly when George 'Buck' Flower -- the most interesting character in the film -- runs off to die in the woods, having been exposed to the contagion first.)
Eventually it comes out that the four survivors (government biochemist Stafford Morgan, loudmouthed jerk John Goff, hysterical bookkeeper Carol Irene Newell, somnambulant station master Ralph Meeker) have to stay awake if they want to stay alive, so the government provides them with coffee and amphetamines to keep them going. (I wonder if theater owners had to do something similar.) Meanwhile, the scientists (John Alderman and Giant Spider Invasion veteran Paul Bentzen) keep working, occasionally pausing to say things like, "I hope those people can stay awake. I hate to think what they'll go through if they fall asleep." Of course, if they're talking about the people watching the movie, the worst that could happen is they might catch a few winks. That wouldn't be so bad, would it?