City girl Meg Tilly receives a horrifying phone call from her mother and, understandably shaken, returns home to her family's rural digs, only to be faced with a mystery: why are all the homespun residents acting out in bizarre and unsettling ways? Radiation thriller, with barely a nod to ecology, has small town residents going berserk, which (laughably) includes two women gazing at each other with desire in a public place and Tim Matheson receiving oral attention from a girl on an office bench. The picture is too silly for words, wasting Tilly's wistfulness and quiet intensity on trash while forcing itself into a corner it can't possibly hope to get out of. Some of the cinematography by Thomas Del Ruth is good (particularly a fire sequence set inside a garage), though he is let down by the scrappy editing--and a fairly bathetic finale. Simplistic screenplay has nary a surprise nor a shred of originality up its sleeve. *1/2 from ****

I got this DVD after seeing Meg Tilly in 'Masquerade' and wanting to see some of her other efforts. I must say Meg looked very graceful in her opening ballet scene. Meg's IMDb biography mentioned that she started out as a ballet dancer. Her dance training really shone through in this scene.The film starts out with a mild earthquake in a small rural town. Since the film opened with this incident, I knew that it would figure prominently in the plot. Soon afterward, the town residents start to loose control of their impulses.The film slowly declined as the plot unfolded. The premise seemed sound enough, but nothing ever really gelled in the film. Bill Paxton was plain weird as Meg's sexually deviant brother. His stash of provocative pictures of his sister really creeped me out, more than the violence in the film.I never really understood how the vault of toxic chemicals even happened to exist. The remote rural location seemed far from ideal for a chemical weapons production or storage location. If the stored substance was so dangerous, it would eventually escape due to deterioration of its abandoned storage vault, never mind an earthquake. Even the densest bureaucrat would realize the holocaust a leak would produce and have the site cleaned up before the facility was closed. The vault was ideally placed to contaminate the local water table. For all these reasons, the plot failed to maintain credibility.It was kind of eerie to watch all the old cars and travel back to a pre-internet world. It is sobering to realize how much the world has changed in the last 25 years. For this reason alone, I will return to this film someday.

A fantastic idea, about losing control over animal impulses, is bogged down in simplistic thought and poorly directed scenes. The film starts out creepy, but becomes muddled in scene after stilted scene of sex and violence. There is a distinct dirty vibe in the movie that never seems to go anywhere. A man pees on a car, the sheriff tries to shoot some delinquent kids, and a mother stands by as her kids attempt to burn one of her friends. It is all so vile. Only one character, Tim Matheson, has any other kinds of impulses such as curiosity. There are a few effective scenes such as Hume Cronyn's doctor playfully cutting off the oxygen to one of his patients and Tim Matheson introducing tiny Tim Matheson to a young girl. Meg Tilly is completely wasted in a boring role as is Bill Paxton. It is really Tim Matheson's movie and he is not bad. The main problem of the movie is lazy direction that kills every scene before it has a chance to live.

I saw this movie back in 1984, we first started watching "This Is Spinal Tap" and after 5 minutes we were ready to fall asleep. So we went instead to see this movie. If you have any conspiracy theory's going around in your head, you will want to watch this one. The question you have to ask yourself when watching this movie are: Do you think the government would be capable of doing this? (In my opinion there is no doubt that they could) But I don't want to give out too much information as that would be a spoiler and I think that you should view the movie for yourself.But, just to let you know, we still talk about this movie 20 years later and trying to explain it to people is not the easiest thing in the world to do.