This flick isn’t aimed at an urban audience, there are no rappers present in the cast or crew, and the movie is something of a throwback to the 1950’s, where the monster was beaten by high-school science teachers and military officers instead of oh-so-ironic hipster kids and tough cops who don’t play by the rules and you damn kids and your baggy pants and your VH1 and your Jessica Spears and your Britney Simpson and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! So why the hell when the DVD came out did they change the title and spell it with a fucking “z”!?

Much like the number of licks required to either get to the center of a Tootsie Pop or slice up your tongue until you die of blood loss, the world may never know. And I would guess the world probably doesn’t really care, either, so I’m just getting all worked up over nothing like I always do.

Frank Sears is a high-school biology teacher with a dark secret. When he finds out the Fort Lambert military base is going to be plowed under to make way for a casino, he races to the scene. His mother was a researcher there during the cold war, and one night she came into his room before bedtime, carved the numbers S3 V12 onto his hands with a knife, and then killed his father and herself. She had warned him there was something buried under the base that he had the power to stop, and that he must prevent it from ever being disturbed.

Now, I don’t have the greatest faith in Federal intelligence, but I have to assume that even the shoot-first-ask-later Army would be a little more cautious if someone showed up at one of their bases telling them that there was something in the basement created by scientists during the Cold War and if it was disturbed it’d be the goddamn apocalypse. Especially since the base’s records corroborate his story, showing that although there was massive energy consumption and unusual supplies deliveries during the dates Sears gave them, all records on what was being done there have been classified or destroyed. But nope, they go ahead on down into sublevel 3 and dig up vault 12. What they find is a huge iron tank, bolted shut and sealed away in a hidden chamber. Yet another red flag that maybe they should just go ahead and fill that bastard in with concrete and forget they ever saw it. No such luck.

When the hapless soldiers crack the tank open, they find a stew of chemicals filled with laboratory waste and test animal corpses…and a dead scientist. Who isn’t quite as dead as you’d think. When one of the soldiers takes some flash pictures of it, the light activates the organism (organizzabizzleizzm!) and it spreads with terrifying speed, eating all but a couple of the soldiers.

Hazmat specialist Carrie Freeborn is one of the survivors, and she releases Frank from the cell they’re holding him in and the two of them run off to find a way to stop the creature, which spreads several miles in the course of the night, before the Air Force comes in the morning to nuke the whole town into a sheet of glow-in-the-dark glass – an especially bad idea since they discover the creature can convert any kind of energy into food, and either a nuclear blast or the coming sunrise will cause it to totally envelop the Earth. Luckily, the dead scientist in the tank was Frank’s real father, who incubated the creature in his own body, meaning Frank’s DNA makes him not only immune but a living antidote.

Jesus Fucking Sheepshit, what is it about military scientists in these movies? Frank’s father says in an 8-mm reel of exposition that he was booted from his home in Russia for his crazy genetic experiments, but the U.S. Army took him in and asked him to make an unkillable infectious bio-weapon. I get (and am scared shitless by) the military’s desire for bio-weapons. What I don’t get is why would you want it to be able to spread at lightning speed and be UNKILLABLE!? Why the fuck would you want a doomsday weapon you can’t control? That’s like the Chinese earthquake bomb in Doomsday Machine. What good is it to kill your enemies if you kill yourself at the same time? Ah well, it’s not the movie’s only jump in logic.

For example, Frank Sears has an unlimited blood supply. Once they find out his DNA kills the creature, he starts slicing his hands open and touching every infected surface he can find. He must wipe twenty gallons of his own kroovy on various things before he and Carrie finally return to the bunker under Fort Lambert and he opens a serious vein and pours torrents of blood into the nucleus of the creature, pulsing away in his dead father’s chest like an alien vagina from Lovecraft’s worst nightmares.

And then there’s the scene which catapults this from unoriginal-but-competent monster vs. military flick into the B-Movie Hall of Fame of Silly Scenes. When Frank discovers his DNA kills the creature, he decides that before they go back to the bunker to kill its nucleus that Carrie needs to be coated in his blood. She strips down and gives us a glimpse of the good stuff as he’s wiping his bleeding hands all over her body, which is not beyond the norm of what you’d expect from a movie like this. What is a good deal beyond the norm is the way the director chooses to shoot the scene – like he’s directing a fucking softcore Skinemax porn! Carrie writhes and barely chokes back moans, her eyes hooded and her lips parted slightly as she rolls her head back as if Frank is rubbing a very different part of him on a very different part of her. Wow, somebody’s got some serious fetish issues to work out.

That director (also the writer) is Richard Jeffries, who also wrote both the dull-ass Cold Creek Manor, and the surprisingly enjoyable James-Earl-Jones-has-a-car-payment-due flick Blood Tide (co-written by Nico Island of Death Mastorakis). What strange webs are formed by the careers of filmmakers. I wonder if he ever asked JEJ to rub his gory paws on a writhing naked girl?

The effects are unfortunately cheap, and that combined with some clunky dialog and serious scenery chewing by Carrie (Erica Leerhsen) bring this movie down several levels. The fact that there are still moments of tension which keep you believing the world is going to be overwhelmed by a fast-growing blob of invincible tentacles gives the flick an extra dose of credibility that most of these DTV pieces of crap only dream of. The scenes of the creature growing underground and destroying the military’s puny attacks, seen on infra-red view screens, work to the movie’s definite advantage since when we see the creature attacking people in real time it looks like what it is – disinterested actors with no point of reference being strangled by post-production N64 graphics. Infra-red graphics look pretty much the same all over, so being given the suggestion of the horror spreading underground and letting your imagination fill in the details amplifies the effect far beyond what the production’s budget could have shown.

All in all, it didn’t hurt me and that’s all I can ask from movies like this. It entertained me, and at times even managed to squeak a little bit of decent atmosphere in there. And then of course there’s the hilariously “erotic” full-body blood rubdown. That alone is worth the price of admission.