“You can never be too rich, too thin, or too armed.”

Justin’s rating: This is what happens when you let Apple implant a chip in your brain, I’ve been telling you

Justin’s review: Some people say the golden age of B-movie horror films are long since gone, forever vanished to whatever state that giant nuclear ants and 60-foot women go to when it’s time to retire. Iowa? Anyway, that’s just hobgnosh, since we kept getting sequels to films like Leprechaun or (and God help us all) Air Bud: Golden Retriever. Some modern bad horror flicks have no disillusion about what they’re bringing the public; the studio hopes that maybe five people will rent this and then it can afford takeout Chinese tomorrow night. Yet some other films sport massive disillusions to their very nature. Despite having scripts written with fingerpaint (wasn’t that stuff cool?), they still force respectable actors to be straight-faced about it, instead of hamming it up like they properly should.

Virus is the latter, a mishmash of sci-fi and body horror concepts that has no other great strength than just being plain bad. Yet I liked it. Virus joins Deep Rising in replacing a haunted house with a big ol’ ship, kind of a “terror on the high seas” concept. Our heroes are a bunch of traders and scavengers who stumble upon a supposedly deserted Russian research vessel. The scavengers’ captain (Donald Sutherland) is a depressed moron, their second-in-command is scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis, and I’m pretty sure that a Baldwin is in there as well.

Desperate to make serious dough by claiming the ship as salvage, the crew tempts fate and ends up yelling a lot before icky squishy sounds ensue. Do you ever notice that people in horror films tend to shout a lot? And not even at the scary moments, like, all the time. “I HAVE TO GO TO THE BATHROOM!” “DON’T FORGET TO LIGHT A MATCH, YOU IDIOT!” “AHH! YOU DIDN’T PUT THE TOILET SEAT DOWN!”

So far it sounds like the plot to Alien, right? Hold on, for the ripoff keeps on rolling. It seems this particular terror originated from an outer space light-virus-thing that beamed down from Mir onto the ship and promptly got stuck there. Poor space virus, it doesn’t even know how to work a modem. It then whittles away the time by turning the entire crew into cyborgs, all of which look like rejects Star Trek’s Borg. The overflow from this project gets pretty gruesome as the boarders discover all the human body parts lined up like a conveyer belt, ready for assembly.

Jamie Lee Curtis has never been an object of my fandom. Sure, she can get tough and violent like the best (but never has the greatest of “I just killed you or am about to kill you” lines), and she can scream (but never quite looks terrified). Generally, she exists to have morbid premonitions (“Something’s not right…”) and shepherd all the squabbling victims to their doom. They do find another female on board, but the law of horror survival says that only one woman can make it to the end credits alive, and Jamie’s willing to engage in cannibalism if that’s what it takes.

Easily the highlight of Virus comes toward the end when Baldwin and Curtis escape the ship. Early on in the film, the token black guy goes moderately insane and starts building some toy, muttering to himself in a moderately insane kind of way. I sometimes talk to myself, but I rarely, say, build a custom Harley while doing so. Anyway, he finishes building his toy and promptly gets killed (of COURSE he gets killed… we might be able to tolerate a homicidal virus unleashed on mankind, but we dare not let an inventor loose, since he might create a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows). It turns out that he made a massive ejection seat like what KITT would use if it were an ocean-going vessel. So the survivors end up using even though they put in zero effort into making it.

This haunted house at sea is somewhat intriguing with the idea of a high tech monster instead of hosting the typical demon or a killer swarm of bats. Most of the actors get to play double duty as the “good” guys, and their evil Borg counterpart. I give Virus some credit for giving both the good and bad guys some serious armament which results in a pitched battle and plenty of bloody moments.

However, it’s no hard stretch to rip holes in the story’s weak (and laughable) plot, particularly when it comes to this superintelligent virus that is [spoiler] VULNERABLE TO WATER and thus promptly LANDS ON A BOAT. Really, just watch to see the cool little death machines which come in all flavors and sizes. Virus 2 was supposed to revolve around a kitchen toaster’s homicidal plan to knock off a June Cleaver lookalike, but unfortunately that project was scrapped.