What Not To Watch: Spill aka Virus

I really did not want to end our week long celebration of football’s impact on the world of action entertainment on a negative note, so I decided to table my less than stellar review of the Brian Bosworth movie The Operative and see if I could find another movie in his filmography to review here today… I found one and it was actually worse!

First off, there is an attempt to attach Stephen King’s name to this movie, although I have found no evidence that he had anything to do with it. Unless it was some other guy named Stephen King and we have some bait and switch action going on.

Second, we have my biggest movie pet peeve… the alternate title. This movie was originally conceived as Virus, but later when it made the rounds on cable television the name was changed to Spill. At least the Virus DVD cover tells the truth… there is no antidote. Because there is absolutely no antidote for this horrible film. As I watched it my movie loving soul was rotting.

• The Premise: Brian Bosworth plays Ken Fairchild, a former college football star, who is now protecting the President of the United States as a member of the Secret Service. Fairchild, who was scouting a location for a big Ecological Summit, finds himself trying to prevent an epidemic when there’s an accident involving a biological warfare experiment. That sounds like it could make for a thrilling, action packed movie, with the whole beat the clock sense of urgency the situation had… instead we get to see The Boz and a veterinarian roam around the woods, while random people exposed to the virus die and the President’s advisor Eric Black, the man responsible for this disaster, talks on the phone with underlings and stooges to cover the whole thing up. The run time on this movie is 87 minutes, but I assure you it felt like 807.
• The Logic: Obviously there will have to be an explanation why all these people up in the forest have died, especially with a hard nosed reporter like Leo Burns (Chuck Shamata of Death Wish V fame) roaming around. So the government stooges stage a bunch of car accidents, rock slides and drownings to explain the deaths. That shouldn’t raise any red flags or conspiracy theories. #Sarcasm. I’m guessing a lot of people were going to opt not to be “one with nature” after news got out of this killer forest. The smart thing would have been to blame all the deaths on Jason Voorhees, nobody would have questioned that.

• The President: Stephen Markle plays President John Lawrence Wheeler. Markle, born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada is playing the President of the United States?! A non-American playing the President of the United States?!!? That is unheard of…. oh wait… Ok, I’ll accept a non-American playing the POTUS, but I will not tolerate one of his advisors being played by a guy from Saskatchewan. He didn’t even try to mask his aboots!
• The Lack of Justice: And speaking of the President’s advisor, one of my biggest issues with this movie was the ending. There’s no real sense that justice was served where that weasel of an advisor Eric Black is concerned. This is an action movie, if I want to see somebody get away with a horrible crime or get promoted to a higher position after being negligent in their current role, I will just watch actual real life events unfold. In an action movie I want to see things made right! I want to see The Boz dump a 55 gallon drum of this biological warfare chemical on to Eric Black. Eric Black should have been the one dying a slow and painful death in this movie and not the viewers!

Movies like Spill aka Virus were the reason What Not To Watch was conceived. My pain is your gain. If you have never subjected yourself to this movie before, DON’T. There really is no reason to watch this film, unless you have some sort of hazmat suit fetish or you’ve always wanted to see Brian Bosworth marvel at the natural wonder of a geyser and then get stuck in the mud and need to be pulled out by a cowgirl veterinarian.

If I got to you too late and you have already seen this disaster piece but you know of any counseling groups I can attend to help me cope with the memories of this film please share that information in the comments section below.

I’ll leave you with this picture of Brian Bosworth from the movie Spill aka Virus, because it is apparently the only picture they took of him on the set.