Viral Assassins

A breathtaking allegory of the world we live in, Viral Assassins, set in an undefined near future, shows the government's solution to the problem of a new terminal disease – they simply make carrying the disease a capital crime. Most of the film is taken up by a terrifying secret conversation that takes place between three people in one room; skinscrawlingly uneasy secrecy and mistrust, on top of the claustrophobic nature of the setting, make this a film that, in spite of it's modest budget, easily surpasses the tension and watchability of any major multimilliondollar Hollywood movie with a critical edge (in itself a rare commodity). In Viral Assassis you get nothing of the predictable plots that we know from visiting the multiplexes, in this highly original and unique film we are constantly on the edge of our seat until the unexpected climax. Highest possible recommendation..

This movie starts off promising, with a story about 3 government hitmen who deal with their morally-dubious job of killing anyone infected with an epidemic virus. It's the kind of story you can do pretty well in a low-budget movie, and I thought the 3 lead actors were pretty good (for B-movie standards). But the movie just falls apart with sloppy writing that makes no sense, really bad visuals, mind-numbing filler, and a couple of truly terrible actresses who drone on horribly.

It's just impossible to care about the plot: we have a super-virus spreading across the land, a virus whose victims act perfectly healthy & can outrun a trained killer for hours on end. We have government killers who are allowed to kill people as painfully as they choose... Why? And those killers get covered in blood, yet never get infected by this "super virus." That'd be OK for a comedy, but this is all played as serious drama!

The lighting is horrible in this movie, especially at the beginning when the light is blinking on the actors' faces, like they're trying to give you a headache. If you're looking for a gory horror, there are no fun visuals here.

Most of the movie is about the killers meeting in a hotel room & discussing their latest kills. They try to do some gritty film noir-ish banter on their grim work, and it's pretty okay stuff. But there's SO much filler, with constant repeated footage of 1 guy lighting his pipe, pointless random scenes of a random worker shoveling coal in a furnace (and never ever doing anything important), the typical wastes of film that B-movies use to drag out their runtime to 90 minutes.

The film's gritty lead actors are the selling point, so it really shoots itself in the foot by adding a cliched "pure perfect young pretty girl" who might create a cure for the virus. It's bad enough that we get this embarrassing schoolboy cliche of the idealized girl, but she's a rock-bottom awful actress, and of course she has horribly long tedious speeches.

It's a shame that the bad outweighs the good in this film, because the setup had a lot of promise. You get a young hotheaded killer, a brutal efficiency-obsessed one, and a weary older killer who's questioning his duty. It naturally makes you curious where these characters will go, and the answer is NOWHERE. After the setup, the movie just throws its hands in the air and gives up on any payoff. It tosses in a couple of comic relief actors who can't act, wastes time on them, and rolls the credits. It's a massive "screw you" to the audience.

I want to give this movie credit for its promising parts, but it just goes out of its way to waste the viewer's time. It's a frustrating watch, and that's worse than just being boring or incompetent.

this dystopian sci-fi movie was released by troma on DVD, and being a bit of a troma fanatic, i gave it a watch, expecting something more along the lines of kabukiman or toxic avenger. To my surprise, this movie about a future where super viruses run wild and those whose health care budgets exceed their worth are assassinated was politically charged, and well thought out. 3 men gather in a hotel room, each of them an assassin for the government charged with killing said infected people, and each of them tells a tale of their job. While the acting made me cringe in many parts, still worth a watch if you've got a couple hours to kill.