![[box cover]](../reviewimgs/v/virus.jpg)
Virus
Some movies are bad, and some are downright terrible. Virus isn't just that, it's actually unwatchable. Seriously, you will have to make an effort to sit through the whole thing. A tugboat crossing the Pacific with a barge in tow is battered by a typhoon, and, upon reaching calmer seas, the crew discovers a massive Russian ship that appears to have been abandoned. Having lost their cargo, they decide to declare the ship as salvage and tow it to safety, where they will be entitled to 10% of its total value by the Russian government, or roughly $30 million. What they don't know is that the ship had been monitoring a Russian space station and was invaded by a nasty extraterrestrial life-form that consists of nothing but pure energy, and it's determined to exterminate all humans aboard the ship by turning gadgets and spare parts into lethal killing machines. While serving up lots of explosions, gore, and bloodthirsty robots, director John Bruno and producer Gale Anne Hurd commit the deadliest sin of cinema -- they never bother to introduce the characters or define them as people we should care about, completely destroying audience investment. The talented cast (Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin, Donald Sutherland) is squandered in favor of this special effects spree, and what remains is a noisy, silly, seemingly endless series of crises that roll up and down like a roller coaster but never manage to go anywhere. Bruno and Hurd have been frequent collaborators with James Cameron in the past, and like some of Big Jim's lengthy films, they both would have been better off if they would have taken the budget for just one of their diabolical alien machines and given it to a couple of script doctors. Good transfer, DD 5.1, two featurettes (which cover nothing but the special effects, natch), trailer.
