Review #33: Viral (2016)


This review was originally written in October 2017.

Horror Movie October day 3: Viral

Full disclosure: I'm sick and miserable today so that probably colored my perception of this movie. But overall I found this movie incredibly hard to follow because it felt like nothing happened for most of it. It's a story of two sisters caught in the middle of some sort of an outbreak (more on that later) and they're.... trying to reach their dad? Or something? I don't know. Nothing happened for the first thirty minutes of the movie (even after the outbreak started, it was just kind of the characters hanging out) and once it did the pacing was just really off. I could never tell what the stakes were because at one point the government is like hunting down people who are infected, but then the next moment they're gone and one of the characters is taken to a hospital which is still in operation and not at all swarmed with infected people, but then the next moment government helicopters are scoping out which houses to bomb (or at least that's what it seemed like).

One more thing: This movie is called "Viral", and the description says a virus wipes out the majority of the human population. That's all fine and good, except the whole bit at the beginning is about parasites, not viruses, and the outbreak is of these huge nasty worm-things that burrow in through your neck and take over your body. There's nothing in this movie that has to do with a virus, except for the appearance of some early-stage symptoms. If the sickness in your movie is caused by giant parasite worms, you forfeit any right to call your movie "Viral".

Speaking of the description of the movie, wtf movie is it a description for? Certainly not this one. IMDB says "a young woman documents her family's new life in quarantine". Uh, what? I know I had trouble paying attention to this movie, but did I somehow miss every single instance of anything being documented? This is not the story of a young woman "documenting" anything. That would imply a journal, or a video, or any kind of documentation whatsoever. This is just a run-of-the-mill disaster movie.

Final rating: 3/10 Misnomers

Number of Times I Blew My Nose Watching This Movie: Lost count

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