Warning Sign (1985)

What we have here is an unofficial remake of The Crazies. You could also call it a rip-off. Rip-off is a term with certain negative connotations, however; Warning Sign is not a bad film at all. It lacks the cynical bite, the aggression and sprawling vision Romero brings to things, but it is also scarier and with significantly more engaging heroes.

Anyway, the gist of the plot is this: a biotech company, under the guise of working on genetically engineering crops, is in fact a biotech weapons base designed to give the Russians a run for their money. An excellent, very tense opening gives us an almost purely visual account of a biotoxin's outbreak in the facility. The sole member of the security team (mmm, Kathleen Quinlan) follows protocol and locks the place down. A somewhat inept team from the Department of Defense comes in, the local hicks start to get angry and eventually violent, and inside the facility Quinlan must defend herself from an infection that makes its victims into very angry, very violent people.

The characters the film gives us to personalize the tragedy are Quinlan and her husband sheriff on the outside, Sam Waterston. Sheriff enlists a scientist who used to work on an antitoxin in the facility and the three of them try to solve the problem the inept military can't. These characters are all very likable, particularly the scientist, making their plight more engaging than what Romero manages in The Crazies.

The goings-on within the facility are actually very suspenseful. There are enough signs that these people are going to go all George Romero's The Crazies on you, but the film takes its time getting to that. Once it does, it is appropriately jarring. The first kill is done with brutality.

Once one comes to the end, a great deal of suspension of disbelief is required on the part of the viewer. The film had earned my faith enough by this point that I let it go and just enjoyed the film for what it is; but it gets sloppy. An elevator that was jammed to the monsters becomes unjammed just the moment the heroes need it. The scientist figures out an antidote and Quinlan and Waterston, in a ravaged laboratory, manage to find all the ingredients within minutes and prepare it. I've seen episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that were more plausible.

The film is still fascinating on some grounds. Yaphet Kotto's character, who leads the military side of things, is, as in Romero's film, competant, but at the same time gives the impression that these protocols he's following have really only been theoretical up until this point; that he's not entirely sure what he's doing, though he's charged with making it work. This ambiguity is a tribute to Kotto's acting. The character is mostly left behind once the scary climax has to get going.

Also interesting is how the film begins by playing off bio-engineering fears of the time. As it turns out, the engineering of crops is protrayed in a positive light, as the hero scientist engineers crops as a hobby. Long live Norman Borlaug, I guess.

There's a final attempt to humanize the events, to give a nod to those who died (killed by the heroes, mostly) before the antitoxin was discovered that deserves some praise. It could have been glossed over without much notice.

And that's probably more than anybody has ever written about Warning Sign. So there you go.