JLC Regret Watch: Virus (1999)

Watched:  01/16/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director  John Bruno

A while back, I read that Signal Watch fave Jamie Lee Curtis has at least one movie she made which she'll publicly drag.  Which made me curious.  And that movie was Virus (1999), a sci-fi schlock-fest. 

Having just sat through the hour and forty minutes of Virus, I am in agreement with JLC.  This movie is very, very not good.  

It's an alien-invasion film on (a boat!) where it feels like the movie is just abusing your willing suspension of disbelief while delivering scenes and sequences from other movies you've seen before and is daring you to keep watching.

Our plot:  a wave of candy-colored cosmic energy passes through the Mir Space Station, which, in turn, shoots a beam of candy-colored energy into a Russian science vessel.  The beam blasts energy around the ship while the captain is alarmed it's accessing the mainframe (boy we were worried about mainframes still in 1999) and we cut to a standard, post-Abyss rag-tag working crew of a tug boat in a hurricane.

And this is how goofy this movie is.  It's a movie that leads you to believe that a tug boat would sail into a *hurricane* to go reclaim a derelict ship many times its own size.  They then sail *out* of the hurricane.  

Also, that same hurricane later sneaks up on them.  And is undetectable inside the boat, just outside.

Y'all...  

No sooner had they lost their claim than they come across the seemingly abandoned Russian boat.  

What follows is the roughly 85 minutes of running thoughtlessly around a ship as practical effects lumber around, and the concept of a purely artificial intelligence is in no way explored.  People die but we don't know who they are, what their deal or name is.  Jamie Lee Curtis is named "Kit" or "Kelly" depending on the scene.  Donald Sutherland drifts in and out of an iffy Irish accent.  William Baldwin is on screen, but why and what his name is, I don't know.

And if the movie doesn't look and act suspiciously exactly like a more metallic Deep Rising, the end is almost exactly the same with our heroes jet propulsed from a burning freighter.   

Sadly, it's not "so bad, it's good" or "funny".  It's mostly... boring.  And that's a function of bad cinematography, bad lighting, bad pacing, bad characterization, bad storytelling, and probably bad catering.

You can lay the blame here pretty squarely on first-time director John Bruno who changed the script he took on, seemed to have no understanding of things like character, dramatic tension, structure, pacing or what a scene is.   Why they decided to make this movie is a bit of a mystery.  It's not a story that need be told, and by 1999, we're six years past Jurassic Park when it comes to FX, and this movie winds up looking like a movie from 1992 or so with largely practical and optical FX, relying largely on (mostly unconvincing)  animatronics.

It was, coincidentally, Bruno's last feature, too.

Like, I get it - it was a chance to show the power of cool animatronics.  Bruno came out of doing visual FX for James Cameron, but (a) they look outdated by 1999, and (b) they all look like you could take them out with a hammer.  Heck, 1999 is *after* Godzilla and things like Lake Placid were mid-budget movies.

The space intelligence decides to use parts of corpses for parts, and unlike the Borg from STar Trek, you're left wondering "but why?"  Like, once the human body is no longer functioning, it's going to rot in pretty short order.  There's no upside except for looking gross.  The idea is never really explored.  Nor is the idea that the film is called "Virus" because that's how our malevolent space intelligence sees organic beings.  I also am not sure that blowing up a boat at the end would do much to a space entity that travels as a cloud - but no one asked for a sequel, did they?

The real problem is that the movie really has no characters.  It's like the director had no idea that the actual people matter in a movie.  Like, we should know who they are, why they're friends, enemies, etc...  JLC can best be described as "slick haircut" in this movie, and it's @#$%ing JLC.  Donald Sutherland is malevolent, but why?  Who is William Baldwin in this movie?  Why why why why?

I mean, again, The Abyss is right there.  Just do that.  Sadly, I have not seen Deep Star Six or Leviathan to see how they compare in a similar genre.  

Really, the best I can say about this movie is that JLC is in it.  That's...  good for me, bad for her, I guess.  

What's crazy is that the studio clearly thought they had something.  I do remember the ads, but they made action figures, sold a novelization, etc...  

I will absolutely not be mad if one of these shows up in the mail

Just wild.