The Alpha Incident (1977)

The Alpha Incident (USA, 1977) 91 min color DIR-PROD: Bill Rebane. SCR: Ingrid Neumayer. MUSIC: Richard A. Girvin. DOP: Bela St. Jon. CAST: Ralph Meeker, Stafford Morgan, John F. Goff, Carol Irene Newell, George “Buck” Flower, Paul Bentzen, John Alderman.

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This low-budget cousin to The Andromeda Strain and The Petrified Forest has some marquee name value in the casting of Ralph Meeker, a former tough-guy actor best remembered today as Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly. In typical B-movie fashion, however, he is given little to do. Instead, the heroics are given to stalwart leading man Stafford Morgan, who previously had supporting roles in TV shows and low-budget drive-in fare, as Dr. Sorenson, who holds people hostage in a train depot, although the novelty in this scenario is that he’s doing it for their own good.

Sorenson was recruited to supervise a shipment of some micro-organisms from a Martian space probe, to be delivered by train to Denver, Colorado. However, a railroad employee who couldn’t resist snooping, cut himself on one of the slides, and perhaps affected people by touch once the train stopped over in Moose Point! Therefore Sorenson must quarantine everyone at this depot while the scientists race to find an antidote.

The snoopy employee Hank is played by George “Buck” Flower, who made a career playing various drunks, bums and hillbillies in the 1970s and 1980s. His sleepy, folksy drawl fits well with the local colour at the depot. The unlikely romantic lead is the beefy, bearded Jack Tiller (played by John F. Goff), who fashions himself as a sex machine to all the chicks. Throughout this scenario, he makes amorous advances to the receptionist Jenny (Carol Irene Newell, who would later become a director for theater). Meeker is Charlie, the depot manager who has little to do except peer through glasses and smoke. Despite the appearance of some name actors and familiar character players in drive-in movies, this movie still feels like a regional production with its casting of people who don’t have conventional matinee looks. Paul Bentzen from Rebane’s Invasion from Inner Earth is back, playing one of the men who rush to find a cure. For the role of Jenny, Rebane originally wanted to cast a “Marilyn Monroe” type, but his wife wisely talked him out of it, as the casting of Ms.Newell enhances the realism one senses Rebane is striving for. Her resolution to doll herself up while under quarantine (to feel human again!) is all the more heartbreaking as we are more convinced we’re watching a real person.

Plague-themed science fiction films work when they’re not concentrating on extraneous extreme close-ups of organisms, weird music and scientists peering through microscopes, and instead concentrate on the human drama. As such, Ingrid Neumayer’s screenplay is tough going for the first half hour, with far too many scenes of scientists babbling about who knows what, and of Hank spending too much time babbling about who knows what between gulps of booze. However, the film gets in motion once the drama unfolds at the depot.

Once Sorenson learns from his superiors that he and his “hostages” (Hank included) must stay awake until an antidote is found, tensions further ensue, as these sleep-deprived people begin to wear each other down. This mild thriller does have one show-stopping moment when Charlie falls asleep, and we witness the effects of the organism, when his head shrivels, causing his eyes and brain to pop out! While Rebane’s direction is nothing special, he cleverly depicts the government soldiers rather mysteriously, as it is unclear whether they are there to rescue or exterminate our protagonists. The surprisingly pessimistic ending leaves a haunting impression with its oblique freeze frame.

The Alpha Incident was an unlikely drive-in double bill with such things as The Spy Who Loved Me and an obscure film called Star Wars, before becoming a UHF Saturday afternoon staple, and available to VHS and DVD on numerous labels. I first saw the film on DVD: initially paired with Rebane’s Capture of Bigfoot on EastWest (remember those guys?) and then on one of Mill Creek Entertainment’s 50-movie packs: Chilling Classics. It is now available on Blu-ray in Arrow’s awesome boxed set, Weird Wisconsin: The Bill Rebane Collection. Likely presented for the first time in a widescreen aspect ratio for the home video market, the film grain is more present in the Blu-ray up-convert, lending it a “grindhouse appeal”.

The extras on the Blu-ray (shared with his feature film, The Demons of Ludlow) include Straight Shooter: Bill Rebane on The Alpha Incident (9:24), in which Rebane talks about some of its production history (excerpts of this appear in the feature-length 2021 documentary Who Is Bill Rebane?, featured elsewhere on this set); also Rebane’s Key Largo, a 16-minute essay by Richard Harland Smith, who neatly encompasses the film’s probable influences, citing Key Largo, The Andromeda Strain, Arch Oboler’s Five, as well as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and The Crazies: films with plague scenarios, or various characters forced to be enclosed together. He also cites The Alpha Incident‘s relevance during the COVID-19 pandemic, in its depiction of characters forced to quarantine together, and in people’s complaining of their civil rights being lost. (Smith admits the film could have been made with the thought of Legionnaires’ Disease, then in public conscience.) On the surface, The Alpha Incident appears as Rebane’s most “conventional” film, and as result is one I seldom feel the need to revisit. However, seen in the times in which we find ourselves, the film now has an unexpected prescience.