Jamie Lee Curtis had this to say about Virus: “Rob Reiner, for his 40th birthday, had a bad show business party where everybody brought show business clips. Rob’s was playing a hippie on Gomer Pyle: USMC singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Virus is so bad that it’s shocking. That would be the all time piece of shit. It’s just dreadful. That’s the only good reason to be in bad movies. Then when your friends have bad movies you can say “Ahhhh, I’ve got the best one. I’m bringing Virus.””

She also tried to get director John Bruno fired and replaced with Halloween H20 director Steve Miner as she felt that he was horrible. Up until this movie, Bruno had mainly worked in special effects and had only directed the “Soft Landing” opening of Heavy Metal and the Universal Studios ride T2 3-D: Battle Across Time.

Based on the Dark Horse comic Virus by Chuck Pfarrer, who wrote the script along with Jonathan Hensleigh (Jumanji, Armageddon, the director of the Thomas Jane Punisher) and Dennis Feldman (Just One of the Guys, The Golden Child, the first two Species movies), Virus is about the crew of the tug boat Sea Star — drunken captain Robert Everton (Donald Sutherland), navigator Kelly Foster (Curtis), engineer Steve Baker (William Baldwin), Squeaky (Julio Oscar Mechoso), deckhand Hiko (Cliff Curtis), crewman Richie Mason (Sherman Augustus) and first mate J.W. Woods, Jr. (Marshall Bell) — who have lost their cargo due to a storm and decide to check out the wreck of Russian research ship Akademik Vladislav Volkov.

So, you know, Alien. That’s because a signal has made its way through space, hit the space station Mir and killed everyone on the Volkov except for Chief Science Officer Nadia Vinogradova (Joanna Pacuła). This energy brings dead people back to life, replacing their body parts with machinery to create zombie robots that look incredible and made me understand why Donald Sutherland demanded that he do all of his scenes in makeup in one day, because that had to take forever.