The film involves five friends who go on a bachelor party to Las Vegas. Kyle Fisher (Jon Favreau), is on the eve of marriage to the wedding-obsessed Laura (Cameron Diaz). His pals include a Realtor named Robert Boyd (Christian Slater), the antagonistic Berkow brothers Adam (Daniel Stern) and Michael (Jeremy Piven), and a mechanic named Charles (Leland Orser) who doesn’t talk much.
In Vegas, there’s a montage showing them gambling, tossing back shots, and snorting cocaine. A stripper named Tina (Carla Scott) arrives, does lap dances, and is steered into the bathroom by Michael. He lurches drunkenly about the room with her until her head is accidentally impaled on a coat hook. She’s dead. (When I saw the film at the Toronto festival, the audience laughed at a shot showing her feet hanging above the floor. Why?)
Some of the men want to dial 911, but Robert takes charge. How will it look that a hooker has turned up dead in their suite? “Take away the horror of the situation. Take away the tragedy of her death. Take away all the moral and ethical considerations you’ve had drummed into you since childhood, and what are you left with? A 105-pound problem.”
His solution? Cut her up and bury her in the desert. He browbeats the others into agreement, but then a black security guard enters with a complaint about noise. The guard (Russell B. McKenzie) sees the dead body, and Robert stabs him with a corkscrew. Now there are two bodies to dispose of, and the guys stride through a hardware store like the Reservoir Dogs.
The movie makes it a point that some of the guys are Jewish, and uses that to get laughs as they bury the bodies. Jewish law, one argues, requires that the body parts be kept together—so they should dig up the dismembered pieces and sort them out. “She’s Asian,” says another. “Do they have Jews in Asia?” The answer is yes, although surely such a theory would apply to anyone. They start rearranging: “We’ll start with black. Then we’ll go to Asian.”
My thoughts here are complex. The movie is not blatantly racist, and yet a note of some kind is being played when white men kill an Asian and a black. Why then make it a point that some of them are Jewish? What is the purpose, exactly? Please don’t tell me it’s humor. I’m not asking for political correctness, I’m simply observing the way the movie tries to show how hip it is by rubbing our noses in race.
The events described take about thirty minutes. There is not a single funny thing that happens once the men get to Vegas (Diaz has some funny early stuff about the wedding). Nor is the aftermath funny, as the men freak out with guilt and fear. Robert makes threats to hold them in line, but more deaths follow, and the last act of the film spins out a grisly, unfunny, screwball plot. By the time of the wedding, when potentially comic material crawls back in over the dead bodies, it’s way too late to laugh: The movie’s tone is too mean-spirited and sour.
Very Bad Things isn’t bad on the technical and acting level, and Slater makes a convincing engine to drive the evil. Peter Berg shows that he can direct a good movie, even if he hasn’t. If he’d dumped the irony and looked this material straight in the eye, it might have been a better experience. His screenplay has effective lines, as when Robert coldly reasons, “What we have here was not a good thing, but it was, under the circumstances, the smart play.” Or when he uses self-help platitudes to rationalize murder (“Given the fact that we are alive and they are not, we chose life over death”).
But the film wants it both ways. At a Jewish funeral, the sad song of the cantor is subtly mocked by upbeat jazz segueing into the next scene. Mourners fall onto the coffin, in a scene that is embarrassing, not funny. When a widow (Jeanne Tripplehorn) struggles with Robert, she bites his groin, and as he fights back we hear female ululations on the sound track. What’s that about? I won’t even get into the bonus material about her handicapped child and three-legged dog.
Very Bad Things filled me with dismay. The material doesn’t match the genre; it’s an attempt to exploit black humor without the control of tone necessary to pull it off. I left the theater feeling sad and angry. On the movie’s Web site, you can download a stripper. I’m surprised you can’t kill her.
Virus
(Directed by John Bruno; starring Donald Sutherland; 1999)
Ever notice how movies come in twos? It’s as if the same idea descends upon several Hollywood producers at once, perhaps because someone who hates movies is sticking pins in their dolls. Virus is more or less the same movie as Deep Rising, which opened a year earlier. Both begin with small boats in the Pacific. Both boats come upon giant floating ships that are seemingly deserted. Both giant ships are inhabited by a vicious monster. Both movies send the heroes racing around the ship trying to destroy the monster. Both movies also have lots of knee-deep water, fierce storms, Spielbergian visible flashlight beams cutting through the gloom, and red digital readouts.
Deep Rising was one of the worst movies of 1998. Virus is easily worse. It didn’t help that the print I saw was so underlit that often I could see hardly anything on the screen. Was that because the movie was filmed that way, or because the projector bulb was dimmed to extend its life span? I don’t know and in a way I don’t care, because to see this movie more clearly would not be to like it better.
Virus opens with berserk tugboat captain Donald Sutherland and his crew towing a barge through a typhoon. The barge is sinking and the crew, led by Jamie Lee Curtis and William Baldwin, want to cut it loose. But the barge represents the skipper’s net worth, and he’d rather go to the bottom with it. This sequence is necessary to set up the skipper’s avarice.
In the eye of the storm, the tug comes upon a drifting Russian satellite communications ship. In the movie’s opening credits, we have already seen what happened to the ship: A drifting space cloud enveloped a Mir space station, and sent a bolt of energy down to the ship’s satellite dish, and apparently the energy included a virus that takes over the onboard computers and represents a vast, if never clearly defined, threat to life on Earth. Sutherland wants to claim the ship for salvage. The crew board it, and soon are fighting the virus. “The ship’s steering itself!” one character cries. The chilling answer: “Ships don’t steer themselves.” Uh, oh. The methods of the virus are strange. It creates robots, and uses them to grab crew members and turn them into strange creatures that are half man, half Radio Shack. It’s up to Curtis, Baldwin, and their crewmates to outsmart the virus, which seems none too bright and spends most of its time clomping around and issuing threatening statements with a basso profundo voice synthesizer.
The movie’s special effects are not exactly slick, and the creature itself is a distinct letdown. It looks like a very tall humanoid figure hammered together out of crushed auto parts, with several headlights for its eyes. It crunches through steel bulkheads and crushes all barriers to its progress, but is this an efficient way for a virus to behave? It could be cruising the Internet instead of doing a Robocop number.
The last half hour of the movie is almost unseeable. In dark dimness, various human and other figures race around in a lot of water and flashlight beams, and there is much screaming. Occasionally an eye, a limb, or a bloody face emerges from the gloom. Many instructions are shouted. If you can explain to me the exact function of that rocket tube that turns up at the end, I will be sincerely grateful. If you can explain how anyone could survive that function, I will be amazed. The last shot is an homage to The African Queen, a movie I earnestly recommend instead of this one.