Director:
John Bruno

Screenplay:
Chuck Pfarrer, Jonathan Hensleigh

Cast:
Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin, Donald Sutherland, Joanna Pacula

Action/Horror/Thriller/Sci-fi, USA/UK/Germany/France/Japan
1999, 99 minutes, colour

Logic, reason, common sense – they all get thrown overboard with a mighty splash in VIRUS, a wonderfully glorious hybrid of “Alien” and “Terminator”, thus allowing viewers to revel in another classic slice of that late 1990s genre, the Oh-my-gosh- don’t-go-there-AAAGGGHH!-film.

High-tech meets sci-fi horror on the high seas when the motley crew (Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin and other assorted victims) of the salvage ship Sea Star (captained by a scenery-chewing Donald Sutherland) take possession of a seemingly abandoned Russian research vessel. The keywords here are ‘possession’ and ‘seemingly’, because an evil alien life form has got there before them, seized the ship, wiped out all but one of the crew and decided mankind is the titular virus that has to be eliminated on its way to, what else, world domination.

Cue assorted mayhem, vanishings, grisly and gory deaths, things going bump in the dark, great CGI effects, alien robots made out of body parts from the force’s human victims and, fi nally, the showdown battle between the two survivors and a giant killing machine.

A highly entertaining romp, a solo or shared pleasure and even an ideal party film, VIRUS starts small and builds the suspense and action, as any good genre film should, till the no-holds-barred, balls out finale when all hell breaks explosively loose.