Flying Virus (2001)

Very disappointing...

One of my all time favorites.

Fresh and Exciting

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

'Killer Buzz'? I wish. You can't blame me for trying. I must've downed 16-17 beers attempting to get through this movie. And all that got me was a "killer" hangover and deeper depression from having spent more time on this crud than the length of the preview. I've read this was originally called (much more appropriately) 'Flying Virus' as the advertised bees (hence the title & cover) share approximately 15 minutes screen time out of an exhausting 95 minutes. I love "When Animals Attack" films, even bad ones, but this is a cheap Rambo-less low-budget jungle action movie. At least half of it is. The other half should've been called 'Airplane III in 3-B.' When I was young, I might as well admit I was infatuated with Gabrielle Anwar (including her wonderful Tango scene in 'Scent of a Woman') and I thought Craig Sheffer might go someplace outside 'Some Kind of Wonderful.' (Rutger Hauer has no excuse – he would've ended up in the same Mickey Rourke retirement home had it not been for 'The Wrestler.') Unfortunately, they ended up in this cheap Sci-Fi reject, which spent some of its $50 budget on explosions and stuntmen jumping all over the place and less on a wire-held plane. I was hoping the mostly absent bees to reach civilization sometime. They almost do – they all buy coach seats and terrorize Sheffer and nobodies on a plane making 'Snakes on a Plane' look like a masterpiece. The other half involves – get this for being original – corporate greed & using mutated bees to get oil. Some people watch b-movies for a good laugh. I promise you two, but unfortunately, you'll have to wait until the closing. #1 Sheffer's rope act and #2 the line "let's get out of here." Where were they going? Hilarious.

This is without a doubt the worst movie I have ever seen outside MST3K. In fact, it would have been a perfect candidate for Mike and bots to snark on, and I can only hope that the Film Crew might discover it one day and give it the appropriate treatment. The writing is terrible, and the film doesn't even TRY to make any of the characters likable. From sullen, duck-billed Gabrielle Anwar to scruffy, chip-on-the-shoulder Craig Sheffer, to Rutger Hauer, who looks astonishingly like Michael Moore in this film, there is not one character I wouldn't be happy to see stung to death by killer bees. Ann Bauer is supposed to be a sexy reporter who has men falling like ninepins everywhere she goes, but she absolutely no chemistry with anyone in the movie, neither her loathsome soon-to-be ex-husband or the laughable Lothario, Scotty. Anwar mutters her dialog half the time, and Sheffer seems to think that grumbling sarcasm denotes strong masculinity.These two characters are supplemented by Hauer's Ezekiel, some nutcase American commando who lurches about waving a pistol in one hand and a little black book in the other. One guess what THAT is supposed to be, and I don't think it's the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice. There is also a U.S. State Department official named Scotty, who mysteriously seems to be running the entire Brazilian Amazon, with just one office and no secretary. According to this movie, Brazil has no real government, because Americans have moved in to eradicate native tribes, carpet-bomb nice upper-middle class towns, set up military no-go areas and take home all the oil. I'm guessing they picked on the State Department to run this operation, because trying to pin it to the better-known CIA and Department of Defense would have been too unbelievable.This movie gives the term "ugly American" a whole new level of meaning. The must insulting suggestion is that American soldiers don't seem to know how to shoot when confronted by loincloth-wearing bushmen armed with spears and bows and arrows. Wave after wave of machinegun-toting American commandos are mowed down by flying spears and flaming arrows before they can manage to get off a single shot. Of course, they obligingly stand upright and go running across clearings even though they are surrounded on all sides by bushes and buildings, so it makes it a bit easier for the natives to take aim. And boy, can they aim! Every dart kills a soldier, and every flaming arrow hits a can of gasoline, causing an explosion which kills a few more Americans. I guess in basic training, these guys were told that if their clothes catch fire, they should go flailing across country, until they find another barrel of gasoline to catch hold of for support. It's like watching 4 Denethors charging across the screen. "Oil" seems to be the magic word here, which smooths away inconvenient facts and excuses the most ludicrous plot device, in this case, killer bees that will ethnically cleanse the Amazon of inconvenient natives so Americans can systematically rape the land. Actually, I think the writers deserve an award for their restraint: they managed to get through the entire movie without once using the word "Bush".The movie also uses a hoary old cliché, which is that natives are well-meaning but disorganized. They need a white man to turn them into a potent force, and this shows up in the shape of the mysterious leader of the 'Shadow People', an American doctor named (I kid you not) 'Savior' (Duncan Regehr), who righteously lectures Ann on America's polluting ways, citing this as "one small example of your government's policy of sacrificing the environment for corporate greed." Half the idiocy takes place on the ground, and the other in the air on a bee-infested passenger jet where Ann's husband Martin gets to prove what a hero he is. He is accompanied by Easily-Led Captain ("You're in charge out there"), Feisty Black Stewardess, Nerdy Kid, Surfer Babe and Bill Maher Wannabe. Everyone else is just ethnically diverse background chorus.

This is the worst movie I've seen in a long while. The story wasn't exciting at all, the scenes inside the plane were terribly unrealistic. Few movies I've seen with the "airplane disaster theme" had been good though.I mean Adam and the woman who helped pulling the Dr. North into the plane would be sucked out like never before had it been in real life.Fun to see all sharp turns that plane took in the air...So typical that a young computer geek with glasses would stop the missile from hitting the plane, seen that before? Oh yeah...So typical that it all had to end in a kiss..I would like to see the 767 that could manage that landing and still stand on its wheels while on the ground.The first scenes with the shooting took way too much time as well.There are B movies but this doesn't even qualify into that category.

Well... only worth watching if you really have nothing better to do. The story is ludicrous, the dialogue embarrassing and the special effects cheesy in the extreme. However, it did provide some laughs. It is worth watching just for the aeroplane sequences. How they persuaded Rutger Hauer to appear in this is hard to imagine and while Gabrielle Anwar is not the greatest actress in the world she would have been hard put to do much with this dialogue. I would love to know how much the budget was for this movie. They can't have shot more than one take of anything and I should think the whole thing was made in a week. Have fun!