Movie Review: Viral (2016)
Synopsis: High Schoolers Stacey and Emma are new to a suburban neighborhood in California. While Stacey, the older of the two, easily makes friends, Emma needs some convincing just to talk to Evan, the boy next door. Soon after one of their classmates comes down sick from a mysterious illness involving a parasite, their community is put on lockdown, preventing their parents from getting home and forcing the two to survive on their own as the CDC forcibly removes others who are infected. Things go from bad to worse when Stacey, who was exposed at a party, becomes infected as well.
Who's in it? The movie stars Sofia Black-D'Elia, Lio Tipton, Travis Tope, Michael Kelly and Colson Baker.
Review: I let my wife pick out a movie last night while I was making dinner, asking her for either an action film or horror movie. By the time I sat down, she had picked out the film Viral. At first, I wasn't sure what to expect from it because I didn't recognize any of the actors. However, it turned out to be a surprisingly good film.
Filmmakers tend to think bigger is better when it comes to horror movie monsters. I am a person who disagrees with that belief. In my opinion, the smaller movie monsters are much more likely to give a person the creepy crawlies. In this case, that smaller monster happened to be a parasite that could be transmitted just by being in proximity with someone who has one and it not always being clear who is infected.
In fact, for a movie that was made a few years before the COVID pandemic, the movie got a lot of things about outbreaks surprisingly correct. One of those, for example (in addition to the parasite originating from China), was the decision to throw a party when there was a deadly disease causing the town to be in quarantine. I saw that, turned to my wife and asked, "does that seem familiar?"
The movie also does a good job setting the overall mood by cutting off Emma (Black-D'Elia) and Stacey (Tipton) as well as their neighbors off from the outside world. This created a lot of questions about just how widespread the pandemic had become by the time President Barack Obama (nice touch using a real president, by the way) declared martial law. Movies like this are always a little more intense when the audience is left in the dark about the big picture.
The sisterly love between Stacey and Emma helped this movie as well, with Stacey not wanting to let the virus cause her to harm her younger sister and Emma both refusing to give up and even risking her own life in an attempt to save Stacey. I prefer stories like that to the typical romance between main characters (though there was also one of those, to a lesser extent). Plus, it made it easier to care about what happened to them.
I wasn't overly crazy about the movie's ending. It wasn't terrible but it could have used a little something extra. In its current form, it was honestly a bit bland. I kept waiting for some sort of last-second surprise twist, such as one of the survivors secretly being infected, but none ever came.
Final Opinion: The movie doesn't have well-known actors but is a solid horror film that we enjoyed watching, in part because of the real-life deadly pandemic that happened not long after it was made.
My Grade: A
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Here are some reviews of other horror movies:
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