Virus

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Well, once again Jake has given the guys a movie for which none of them can offer a reasonable excuse for its existence: 1999's Virus, starring Donald Sutherland, Jamie Lee Curtis, and William Baldwin. For some reason.

Perhaps his ruggedness?

Virus is a movie based on a comic book--part of the rash of license purchases that followed the success of Blade. And the fact that it is a movie based on a comic book is the only thing that this movie has in common with Blade. It's the story of the crew of a barge that is towing mysterious objects that are quickly ignored in favor of a deserted Russian research vessel they run across while trying not to die in a monsoon or typhoon or whatever the hell it is that they call storms out there in the Atlantic ocean.

Whatever it's called, Jamie Lee is visibly excited about it!

While investigating the ship as they hide in the eye of the storm, Captain Donald Sutherland claims salvage rights for his crew and they begin searching for a way to power the ship up again so they can take it with them. While this is happening, the ship itself tries killing one of the crew by dropping an anchor on him (Cliff Curtis), but it misses and just sinks their ship.

Now stranded onboard the Russian ship, the crew begin searching in earnest for clues, although it's pretty obvious that they aren't all that good at doing this sort of thing, as they ignore bullet holes all over the ship and completely fail to notice Russian words written on a wall in blood.

Good news, guys! They had puppies!

Slowly, our "heroes" begin to realize that the computer system on the ship itself has become infected with an alien virus that is controlling everything and trying to build robots for world domination. (Because, really, isn't that what all aliens want?)

And guess who yells about it...A LOT?

Some of the crew discover a survivor named Nadia (Joanna Pacula), who explains that the rest of the ship's original crew has been murdered by the shipboard computer. Her husband, Alexi (Levan Uchaneishvili), was the captain, but then had his brain pulled out with a melonballer and replaced with a circuit board with a murder chip installed, as well as a dial-up modem. (This was 1999, after all.)

And guess what! It turns out Alexi isn't the only murderbot on the ship! In fact, there's a bunch of them, as well as a factory that's geared up to crank out more! There are even some sort of weird robo-shrimps running around, welding doors shut! Those kooky murderbots.

This is what my life has come to? I was in
M*A*S*H!

Will they make it through the storm? Will the murderbots make it to land so they can begin their takeover of the world? Also, why William Baldwin?

Derek thinks this movie is amazingly stupid. And, although he does like seeing Donald Sutherland and Jamie Lee Curtis yelling lines at each other, he feels it would be better if that happened in another, better movie.

Larry did not care for this movie, either, although he did think Nadia was pretty hot. His disappointment that there were no nude scenes with her or Jamie Lee Curtis is palpable, and he had to go home and abuse himself to Trading Places to make himself feel better.

Jake also didn't like the movie, but his biggest issues involve the cinematography and lighting choices. And, to be honest, he's right. What makes it worse is that the movie was directed by the same guy who was the effects supervisor for a little James Cameron flick you may have heard of called Titanic. Seriously...What the fuck happened?

So put on your life preserver, plug in your brain, and tune in to this week's episode!