As the nuclear-slush green credits roll, one distinction that immediately transfixes your attention will be the music score which is co-composed by the now legendary percussionist Hans Zimmer. As with most of his accompaniments, the enthusiastically ballistic, ultimately anticlimactic Nightmare at Noon is immeasurably annexed by his eardrum-trouncing contributions.

Nick Mastorakis is insolently quizzical of the canyon yokels when one hillbilly drives up to a water-poisoning experiment and he cheerily beseeches “Hi fellas. Them’s pretty lights. Whatcha doing? Making a movie?” In response, the team of armored henchmen perforate his truck full of ammunition.

Brion James was always pigeonholed as a Teutonic malefactor and in Nightmare at Noon, his skin palette is etiolated to an albino pallidness. George Kennedy emboldens the infected-person-who-is-concealing-it-from-the-group stereotype and the resolution to his subglacial mutation is a serpentine twist on the formulaic sacrifice on the behalf of the survivors.

The last half-hour is pretty listless with Bo Hopkins (with a strikingly pumiced resemblance to Steve McQueen) galloping on horseback behind the trail of James and their quick-draw showdown is aggravatingly flagrant from the supernumerary referendums to High Noon (in both Wings Hauser’s wiseacre dialogue and on a drive-in theater marquee).

The primal-instinct, pulpy helter-skelter of dopamine-induced gunfire and stuntmen engulfed in pyrotechnic flames is suppressed by a long-winded, occidental trek through the Utah mountains and an aerial dogfight between helicopters that is hyperextended into rotary-blade repetition.

One thing I wouldn’t anticipate from a sordid exploitation guilty pleasure like Vice Squad is a disclaimer that the film was produced with the contributions and cooperation of the Los Angeles law enforcement. Gary Sherman bedraggles and tarnishes the West Coast boulevards until they rival the prostitution rings and narcotics parade that was 42nd Street in New York.

Season Hubley’s Pygmalion transformation from demure businesswoman and matriarch to streetwise nightwalker in gaudy mascara (who negotiates with clientele about “golden showers”) is like a butterfly in chrysalis. Sherman and his cadre of screenwriters imbue Princess and extorting detective Tom Walsh (Gary Swanson) with the diogenic, urban depth of people who must scrounge around the gutters and Augean filth for their misogynistic target.

Fortunately the film doesn’t resemble an episodic Dick Wolf TV pilot with vestigial, case-of-the-week vignettes around junkies, informants and murderers. However, a slow-burn interlude with Princess in scantily clad wedding garb at a funeral parlor is a weirdly humorous, idiosyncratic fetish around dominatrix necrophilia.

The film is finely delineated by its hardscrabble cynicism and the adrenergic, race-against-the-clock hunt for an evasive, abusive fugitive on the lam (for Princess, the incarceration of Ramrod (Hauser) is a futile and ephemeral endeavor- “That ain’t no jail. It’s a hotel with a revolving door”).

Today Wings Hauser is unanimously known to contemporary viewers as the father of Cole who is also typecast as opprobrious villains in Higher Education, 2 Fast 2 Furious and Hart’s War. Back in the 80’s, Wings was a ferociously eye-bulging, lantern-jawed character actor and his juicy, rancorous role as the sadistic pimp Ramrod might be his signature shibboleth.

In sequined shirts and a 10-gallon cowboy hat, Hauser doesn’t mince gestures as he fondles Princess upon their strip-club rendezvous. After the bruising death of Princess’ shivering friend, Ginger (Nina Blackwood), the sting operation to ensnare Ramrod is extremely white-knuckle. Sherman doesn’t overdose on Ramrod either. After the first half-hour, his appearances are briefly ejaculatory and they are more effectively suspenseful as result.

Before Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and after Hulk Hogan, Rowdy Roddy Piper was a WWF wrestler on the precipice of crossover stardom. Honestly, his husky screen presence and luxurious blonde locks in both They Live (spawning Duke Nukem catchphrase “I’ve come to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”) and Hell Comes to Frogtown should’ve ossified his transition.

Hell Comes to Frogtown boasts a delectable, tongue-in-cheek premise- all the planet’s woman are infertile in the post-apocalyptic dystopia. One exception to the phenomena is Sam Hell (Piper) who is one of the few potent males left. Equipped with a governmental chastity belt, Hell is commissioned to be a breeder across the wasteland that is inhabited with mutated, anthropomorphic frogs.

Hell is directly pillaged from the Snake Plissken mold- he’s a reluctant patriot and Piper is apposite for the yeoman role. Donald G. Jackson and R. J. Kizer plaster juvenile double entendres and sexual innuendos for the lowest-common-denominator viewers on the wavelength of Troma (a doctor’s office sign’s slogan is anti-condom “take the future into your own hands”).

New World Pictures isn’t a distributor with extortionate bottom lines and therefore, most of the lines are unintelligible and should’ve been re-recorded with ADR looping. Likewise, the movie is parsimonious with pell-mell action sequences yet it undulates on schlocky felicity. Before then, it is swamped with skin-flick nudity from the voluptuous corporals to the horn-rimmed scientists.

In fact, the first quarter of the movie doesn’t slum like the sleazy plot requires. It mostly meanders through the desert while Hell flirts or is erotically accosted by his female companions (although the bondage scenario with Spangle (Sandahl Bergman) is ludicrously titillating). A B-movie like this should’ve slashed the brakes and throttled into raunchy muscularity earlier.

Luckily, Piper is the breakout star here and he doesn’t botch the opportunity. The amphibian prosthetics are much more polished than one would anticipate for the kitschy, miserly resources at hand. However, it is squandered potential when someone of John Sayles’ caliber could’ve maximized the transspecies Mad Max lunacy and witticisms behind the “greener” menace.