Virus

Virus (1999)

Life on earth is in for a shock.

When the crew of an American tugboat boards an abandoned Russian research vessel, the alien life form aboard regards them as a virus which must be destroyed.

Date of release
1999-01-14
TMDB
5.4 / 10 (728)
Runtime
1h 40m
Genres
Horror, Action, Science Fiction
Director
John Bruno

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Virus
  • Filmed in: North Carolina

Virus is a 1999 American science fiction horror film directed by visual effects artist John Bruno and starring Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin and Donald Sutherland. Based on the comic book of the same name by Chuck Pfarrer, it tells the story of a ship beset by a malevolent extraterrestrial entity that seeks to turn humanity into cyborg slaves. Virus was released by Universal Pictures on January 15, 1999. The film was promoted with a line of action figures and a tie-in video game.

Production

Chuck Pfarrer initially wrote Virus as a screenplay and pitched it to Universal Pictures who rejected Pfarrer's pitch. Pfarrer, liking the underlying concept, contacted Mike Richardson of Dark Horse Comics, for whom Pfarrer had previously written a comic book sequel to John Carpenter's The Thing titled The Thing from Another World.

After co-directing parts of T2-3D: Battle Across Time at the request of James Cameron who was preoccupied with Titanic at the time, John Bruno was contacted by Universal Pictures following the success of the attraction with an offer to direct Virus with Gale Anne Hurd as producer. Bruno read the script by Pfarrer and didn't like it and also read Dark Horse comic that was expanded from the script and was initially planning to pass on the film.

An international co-production film between The United States, United Kingdom, Japan, France and Germany. The film was mostly shot in Newport News, Virginia, on a ship anchored in the James River. A horizontal bar on the ship was raised and lowered to conceal the horizon line, making it appear the ship was far out at sea. The ship used as the Akademik Vladislav Volkov was the retired Missile Range Instrumentation Ship USNS General Hoyt S.

Several lines of dialogue in Virus were improvised. For instance, Richie's emphatic comment that the Volkov has a "fucked-up" antenna resulted from the actor's surprise at the condition of the Vandenberg.

Filming on Virus began on January 1997 and continued through June of that year.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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