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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 0%
Worth A Look: 2.63%
Average: 10.53%
Pretty Bad: 21.05%
Total Crap: 65.79%
3 reviews, 58 user ratings
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| Virus |
by Scott Weinberg
"Unwatchable, boring and a complete embarassment. Really."
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As a horror fan, I have to defend a lot of movies I like. Things like The Relic and Mimic, Deep Blue Sea and Anaconda. It's rough. This piece of dog shit seems to be most inspired by last year's Deep Rising, which is hardly a movie to model since it's also dog shit. (But I liked even that one.) Virus just blows all the others out of the water as far as the ability to annoy, bore, and just plain repel. Even you horror fans, stay away.>Flush< That's the sound I thought of as the credits rolled on this sad and moronic movie. There's no plot, but even the paper-towel premise is insultingly familiar: Super-human life-form wipes out ship; Smaller ship shows up and crew gets methodically butchered. Sounds tough to screw up even something as stupid as that, but Virus is so devoid of any thought or action that it defies description.
Jamie Lee Curtis is mesmerizingly bad in this movie. Watching her, soaking wet with a quivering jaw, trying to emote something like "Hey, Fred! You're about to be impaled by a mutant laptop computer!" is so sad, I think I'd rather watch videos of those fly-covered Ethiopians.
But then there's Donald Sutherland. Hoo boy. I swear someone must have told him he was doing an Airplane!-type slapstick comedy, because he gives the best unintentionally hysterical performance since Jon Voight in Anaconda. Either that or he's just given up on reading scripts and just shows up at the studio every day, like a homeless man. Also, Joanna Pacula is in this one. She was in The Kiss, Warlock: The Armageddon, The Silence of the Hams and My Giant. If you don't consider that warning enough, I feel sorry for you.
Often in movies like these, simple things like special effects or the supporting cast or a script will help. No luck here. At least Deep Rising had a cool monster. Our villain here looks like a giant closet which is overflowing with old computer equipment. A modem here, a monitor there. My jaw was open. The supporting characters are so poorly developed, it reeks of a complete lack of effort. It's quite stunning that this ever saw the inside of a movie theater, anywhere.There's nothing wrong with real dumb, real fun horror schlock. In fact, it can be quite wonderful. Unfortunately, we horror lunatics have to ocassionally wade through garbage like this to discover something like Dark Angel: The Ascent or Highway to Hell. Search those ones out before you even consider seeing Jamie Cow Curtis in another horror movie. Come on! She considers Halloween: H2O a GOOD career move, for God's sake!
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=562&reviewer=128
originally posted: 11/23/99 13:00:12
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USA
08-Jan-1999 (R)
DVD: 17-Aug-1999
UK
N/A
Australia
02-Mar-2000
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