Adrenalin Fear the Rush [1996]

January 13, 2022

The first thing you should know about Adrenalin Fear the Rush is that it’s not that good. I know this is a strange way to start a movie recommendation but just bear with me. This is a very simplistic horror movie with a rudimentary story and formulaic storytelling. It’s the future, the world is fucked up, the virus turns humans into beasts and cops have to hunt down beasts. Pretty basic stuff right? However, there are a couple of elements to it that separate it from all the other similar movies. We zip through the introduction in less than five minutes and bam, the action starts.

And once it starts, it doesn’t stop. We will make a couple of brief pauses but this movie is all muscle and tension. When you add to this the running time of just seventy minutes you get a nice little action speedball. Granted, we will be spending most of our time in tunnels. I remember watching Adrenalin Fear the Rush just as it came out. And I have to tell you that it scared the shit out of me. Sure, I was just an impressionable teen back then watching a movie I definitely shouldn’t be watching but still.

Moving on, we have an excellent cast for a small B horror movie here. Ten years after Highlander Christopher Lambert could still easily pull off a movie like this. And what to say about Natasha Henstridge who just a year prior made her debut in Species? She was simply gorgeous and went fucking all in proving that there’s a bright career ahead of her. However, the most important member of the crew was Albert Pyun who wrote and directed this movie. Camerawork and editing here feel like they belong in a much larger production. And the same goes for that mind-blowingly good cinematography.

It is the year of our lord Satan 2007 and chaos has enveloped the world. A new virus threatens to destroy humanity so nations build huge walls to protect themselves. Those who are left outside are in a dire situation. And it will only get worse as the police realize that there’s some kind of superhuman mutant on the loose. Mutant who’s out for blood.

Yeah, all plots that have some kind of viral outbreak have a different dimension now. Although it’s set in Boston, Adrenalin was shot in war-torn Mostar, Bosnia. This means that the sets will have a sense of authenticity to them. And if you want to get esoteric, perhaps you could even feel all the horrors of war in them. This fits perfectly with Pyun’s vision for the movie. He wanted to abandon the classical storytelling structure and film something that has more of a documentary vibe to it. You could even say that these are the beginnings of the whole found-footage craze that’s going to take the world by storm in just a few years.

However, I don’t want you to think that this is one of those shaky-cam messes. As I previously mentioned, the visuals here are impeccable. If you want to continue in the same fashion I recommend you check out more of Pyun’s movies like Dollman and Nemesis. Also, you can read up on his most famous movie in our Cyborg [1989] – A Detailed Look Into B Movie Gold. Finally, I just want to mention another curiosity that is the appearance of the infamous Cobra knife. The knife was specifically designed for Cobra, a 1986 thriller starring Sylvester Stallone. Just one year later, it will see some action in Wishmaster also starring Andrew Divoff.