WARNING SIGN
The sign reads "THIS ENDING SUCKS"

  I've always known (well, not in the womb) that if I ever make a killer-virus thriller, I will do everything in my power to not have an ending where they find an instant cure, which is cooked up by non-medical personnel, and it works more or less instantly, and afterwards everybody just leaves the building as-is without any active decontamination.  Uh...I'm not saying that's how this movie ends.

Warning Sign was working up to be a pretty good movie; nothing all that different about it, but it was a pretty effective killer-virus flick.  But it runs out of gas (and gets awfully contrived) in its final third, and slides rather far into the suck zone by the time it's over.  That's too bad; I was rather liking it for a while.

At the Biotek research facility in a sleepy Utah town (please, no Mormon jokes, that's my job!), one research team unzips at the worst possible time and gets infected with a nasty contagion which attacks and pumps up the rage center of your brain.  Result: a whole bunch of raving murderers.  On the upside, everybody trapped inside is being paid overtime.  Sam Waterston plays the local sheriff, and Yaphet Kotto is here too as the shady government guy who's trying to keep a lid on this, while a mob (which behaves as insanely as any of the maniacs would) gather outside.

For about two thirds of its length, Warning Sign delivers the goods; there's a lot of low-key suspense, the relationship between the sheriff and his wife (trapped inside the lab, natch) is likeable, and we even get Jeffrey DeMunn as a guy who used to work in the lab, I always like to see him in movies.  The sheriff limps slightly, the result of a polio infection, and that's also given him a bit of a grudge against (and fear of) the entire microbiological world.  I knew from early on that if this guy gets infected, goes insane, kills people and dies, I'd feel badly for him.  Sympathy.  Isn't that nice?

Warning Sign starts its slide at about the part where Waterston and DeMunn use bolt cutters to cut through the fence around the lab and sneak in when the sizeable military presence isn't looking.  The movie never really recovers; people in this lab don't know what Thorazine is, we get dialogue like "It's different for you!  Germs are your job!", and the ending's awful.  I'm not saying that the ending is what I described in the first paragraph up there, no sir, I'd never want to spoil an ending like that.

Directed (and co-written with Matthew Robbins) by Hal Barwood, who wrote Dragonslayer and, God help us, Corvette Summer, who has appeared to have moved on to making video games.

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