John Paul Fedele refused to cut off his ponytail for his role as Captain Forrester, so Brett Piper had to optically erase Fedele’s ponytail in post-production.
IMDb Trivia.
When your film budget is almost nothing, you shouldn’t waste it on erasing ponytails. And Bacterium is a very low budget, shot-on-video, flick from the director who brought us the abysmal A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (1990), Brett Piper. This time his subject is flesh eating bacteria and paint-ball enthusiasts.
A mad scientist is hiding in a house in the woods that people just can’t stop stumbling into. He created a bacteria for the army to use as a bio weapon but is haunted by it in his weird dream sequences, and the army is after him and the people in his house… I am not sure exactly what’s happening.
The bacteria does liquify people into goo, and the practical effects are fine, but the bacteria doesn’t stop there. It mutates into a bigger and bigger green blob creature that scurries around and attacks the people in and around the house.
Now, there are three domains of life on planet earth: bacteria, achaea and eukaryote. Eukaryote are different from the other two because they have a bound nucleus which enables them to become multi-cellular life like roses, humans and naked mole-rats. That means that the flesh-eating bacteria mutates into a new domain of life here and nobody bats an eye.
The film gets bored with the bacteria though and introduces a scientist who explains that he has two “near critical masses of singularity” and they will combine, create a “super singularity” and destroy everything in the radius of 7 miles. Brett Piper, who wrote this, doesn’t know what any of those words mean. Critical mass is the amount of mass of an isotope needed for a spontaneous fissure event to happen and a singularity is a center of a black hole.
We can actually calculate how powerful this “super singularity” is based on that 7-mile blast radius. It’s about 7000 kilotons, or 7 megatons. The most powerful nuclear bomb was the Tsar Bomba, which was 50 megatons. So, a “super singularity” that is “just” 7 megatons is not great, not terrible.
This film is terrible, though.
