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| Images courtesy of Arrow Video |
Arrow Video’s love and adoration for Grecian cult director
Nico Mastorakis knows no bounds with the boutique label having released nearly
each and every offering of the filmmaker’s oeuvre in lavishly published special
editions for good or for ill like it or not.
Starting with the still supremely foul Island of Death and ending
on his last fictional feature .com for Murder, with exception to a scant
few titles owned by Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow Video has done most of his work on
home video in the US and UK. Sometimes
they work, as with his forays into action-horror-thriller hybrid ala The Zero Boys or The Wind (miraculously generated within the same year)
or his female fighting trainee actioners Ninja Academy or Hired to Kill. Having recently seen the
director’s foray into nonfiction with the Award winning 2018 documentary Mykonos,
the Soul of an Island, an oddly moving if not politically incorrect
portrait of the controversial Grecian-island, Nico Mastorakis has proven he can
occasionally make a good film.
And then there are films like his 1988 rabid biological
weapons eco-thriller Nightmare at Noon which like many other Mastorakis
titles sports terrific locations, unexpectedly explosive stunts, a measure of
star power and even a score by Stanley Myers and Hans Zimmer which forecasts
the grandeur the latter composer would unleash later but never fully delivers
on the promise of the concept. As with
numerous Mastorakis iterations, some elements exceed while others come off as
half-hearted or poorly rendered. The
resulting film despite the seeming vastness of the premise which mixes The
Living Dead at Manchester Morgue and its manmade eco-driven zombie outbreak
with that of a hi-tech computer rendered error ala Wargames kinda
stumbles as an entry in the broad-daylight horror subgenre. That might be partially due to its unruly
lead-actor Wings Hauser from the director’s previous film The Wind but
we’ll get into that shortly.
Considered by some a loose companion piece to the 1984
sci-fi thriller Mutant which also prominently co-starred Wings Hauser
and The Wild Bunch actor Bo Hopkins, Nightmare at Noon witnesses
a group of secret military experiments being conducted by a mad scientist only
known as The Albino (Brion James from Blade Runner). After test-firing a bioweapon into the waters
of a remote rural Utah town which contaminates it and turns all who drink from
it into frothing murderous, green-blooded zombies, our story zeroes in on a
young couple: lawyer Ken Griffiths (Wings Hauser), wife Cheri (Kimberly Beck)
and a hitchhiker they picked up on the way named Reilly (Bo Hopkins). Upon arrival at a small eatery in the town,
they find themselves besieged by the infected residents before banding together
with the local Sheriff Hanks (George Kennedy) and his police deputy daughter
Julia (Kimberly Ross) for survival.
A weird mixture of zombie-outbreak thriller, bioweaponry ecological
fears and late-80s action-adventure replete with car explosions, exchange of
gunfire and an incredible stunt involving a motorcyclist flying over an exploding
car as he comes off the vehicle midair, Nightmare at Noon is a mishmash
which doesn’t always work but has some wild scenery contained therein. Take for instance a helicopter chase sequence
in the backdrop of the Arches National Park which isn’t really that integral to
the plot and doesn’t involve essential characters and goes on for far too long,
but as the choppers whoosh past the camera at high speeds you’re kinda caught
up in the jet winds anyway. Visually it
looks fine enough by Magnum Force camera operator Cliff Ralke with some
nifty mixtures of neon blue-greens for the interior of The Albino’s secret
military van interspersed with green font computer screens. Given most of this takes place at the height
of broad daylight, there’s not a whole lot more room for strange vistas akin to
the ones opening the film outside of green face-painted zombies.
Where the film seems to shine is the score by Stanley Myers
and Hans Zimmer which in some sections plainly forecasts the thundering sonic weathers
of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and its high-pitched organic notes. Though not nearly on the same level of
grandeur as the latter Nolan epic, it clearly stems from the same source of
inspiration. Reportedly
behind-the-scenes, Wings Hauser struggled with alcoholism which included the
filmmakers having to bail the actor out of jail during production. A shame as he comes across here as a Michael
Biehn type of heroic lead. Bo Hopkins
who had a rapport with Wings Hauser following their previous collaboration on Mutant,
coasts on his own aura of debonair detached cool and at times he feels right at
home in a spaghetti western or poliziotteschi in the role of the mysterious
lone hero. George Kennedy is dependable
as the town Sheriff in a role more or less played before in Earthquake
while Brion James as the mute albino adversary is wonderfully weird as ever.
Filmed in 1986 but not released until 1988 and sent
straight-to-video in the United States, Nightmare at Noon came and went
on rental store shelves before vanishing into B-movie cult purgatory. Previously in 2018 Scream Factory released the
film on blu-ray disc for the very first time but seemingly without the approval
of its director. That is until Arrow
Video and Nico Mastorakis’ Omega Entertainment production company provided a
new 2K restoration of the 35mm interpositive approved by the director to make
this current 2022 release the definitive home video edition. As someone who can’t really call himself a
fan of this filmmaker, who has hated many but liked some here and there and was
surprised by the last nonfiction piece, Nightmare at Noon despite the
incredible stunts and aerial helicopter dogfighting still stumbles. With poor makeup effects for the zombies,
behind-the-scenes drama which perhaps hurt the production and some rather weak
man vs. mutant choreographed fights, the genre-bending action/sci-fi-horror
hybrid is unfortunately wildly uneven.
Fans keen on the director will be entertained but this paled in
comparison to The Wind or The Zero Boys despite boasting far more
outlandish stunts and concepts.
--Andrew Kotwicki
