Prescient sci-fi at its best can be found in The Satan Bug (available at Boîte Noire), the ’65 entry in which bioterror becomes real for almost two whole hours!

A secret U.S. government program that is busy developing chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction soon finds that someone has taken off with vials of an ultra-deadly strain of bug. Sure enough, it’s looking like an inside job, and then a Florida town is struck with devastating results-thousands are dead and the thieves are threatening to poison all of L.A. with their stolen booty. There’s some great cinematography here, a cool suspense-action sequence involving a helicopter, and the unbeatable Anne Francis. (Let’s face it: the woman could do no wrong after Forbidden Planet.)
Apart from the inescapable camp value that’s inevitably taken hold as the film has fermented, there’s a true creepiness in its premise, resonating wildly after the Anthrax mailings and Iraq’s alleged bioterror fetish.

The film rates virtually as highly as a retro Hollywood Squares episode in terms of its place-that-face quotient. That’s Ed Asner playing one of the bad guys, and Richard Basehart as a scientist, who’s either best remembered for the high- (Fellini’s La Strada) or lowbrow (TV’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea). :
-Matthew Hays