# Virus (1999)

### reviewed by
Serdar Yegulalp

    Virus (1999)
    *
    A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
    Copyright 1999 by Serdar Yegulalp

"Wretched" is the word to describe "Virus", a film so patently bad that I damn near felt an affection for it. It's hard to make a good movie, but to make a movie that's a failure on every single imaginable level is, in some ways, tougher. It's very difficult to get this many people, all at once, to abdicate any of quality work.

"Virus" plays like a rip-off of both "Deep Rising", another terrible movie from last year, and any of the "Star Trek" episodes that feature the Borg. It starts off with some kind of space cloud "infecting" a Russian orbital station and using the station's antenna to send some kind of computer virus to a communications ship in the ocean below. The virus appears to want to take over humanity, or something, but its methodologies and M.O.s are never clear.

Anyway, the aforementioned ship gets discovered by a tug crewed by Kit Foster (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Steve Baker (William Baldwin). The tug's captain (Donald Sutherland, doing one of his wacko roles) wants to claim the ship for salvage, but it isn't long before they discover Something's Not Right Here. The ship's steering itself, for starters. In such circumstances, the characters are advised to find the screenwriter and beat him to death for the crime of rampant laziness and unoriginality.

It gets worse. The virus manages to build robot incarnations of itself and use those to transform the crew members into things that look like rejected test reels for the Cenobites from "Hellraiser". The master creature is laughingly reminiscent of a Pop Art junk sculpture, and looks about as threatening. It drills through bulkheads and barks out idiotic pulp-movie dialogue in a voice that sounds like my car's "Your door is ajar" warning on very bad drugs.

According to the movie's press kit, the movie was drawn from a Dark Horse comic series with the same name. Dark Horse is a comic imprint that specializes in strong, compelling stories. My guess is that they liposuctioned the story out of the comic before filming it.

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