aka Flying Virus

• Written and directed by Jeff Hare
• Starring
  • Gabrielle Anwar
  • Rutger Hauer
  • Craig Sheffer
  • Jason Brooks
  • David Naughton

I’m all for multi-tasking, but this movie is trying to be two movies at once, and that’s rarely a good thing. One the one hand, it wants to be an eco-friendly anti-corporate cautionary tale; on the other, it wants to be a “people trapped aboard a plane with something unfriendly” thriller. What ties the two sides of the story together? Why, killer bees, of course.

Gabrille Anwar is Ann Bauer, a reporter in Brazil with her cameraman Raka (Mark Adair-Rios) covering the construction of a new superhighway. Seems that native tribes have been protesting against the U.S. because it didn’t sign the Kyoto Accord, and because U.S. oil companies are polluting and uprooting and doing all those good all-American things for the sake of progress (i.e., money). The upshot is that the U.S. is funding a new 100-mile highway specifically for oil transport and promising not to make any more messes elsewhere.

Right after Ann finishes taping the story that gives us the above helpful background info, we find out why American military personnel are guarding the construction site (i.e., the collection sheds with oodles of gas tanks and a few heavy machines around): scores of natives sneak out of the jungle with blowguns and start attacking, then (unlike stupid white people in most movies) grab the guns of the fallen Americans and really start to do some damage. It would be tedious to describe it for you, but believe me, at least half of the budget was spent in the first ten minutes, with all of the squibs, dying Brazilian extras, and really big explosions (I ain’t never seen so many barrels with “GASOLINE” stenciled on them).

“So tell me again — what were you saying about American imperialism?”

Hope you enjoyed that, because it was kind of the high point of the movie. (What? Before Rutger Hauer’s even appeared? Yup.) After that, with all the effort of trying valiantly to make sense, things kinda fall apart a bit.

So. Thanks to the fact that they’re not Brazilian extras, Ann and Raka come through okay, as does Scotty Turner (Jason Brooks) the U.S. State Department liaison who’s taken a bit of a shine to Ann. Raka takes the moment to remember he’s a journalist, and videotapes some of the fallen natives, one of whom survives his explosion burns just long enough to declare himself one of the legendary “Shadow People,” and to say that they attacked because of the “demons from the sky.” (Unlike Ann, Raka speaks Portuguese — a handy skill to have if one were going to be covering the Brazilian beat for any length of time, I’d think.)

By the way, there’s no really convenient place to tell you, so I’ll just do it here: Scotty is a bad guy. I suppose this technically qualifies as a spoiler, since it’s not actually “revealed” until near the end of the movie, but honestly, anyone who hadn’t figured it out within the first half-hour is so far down the IQ scale that they’d be licking their keyboard and Crayola-ing their screen instead of reading this review.

“It’s like retirement, but they’re paying me!”

Anyway. Ann showcases her tremendous journalistic instincts by insisting that the U.S. guards were trying to keep them from something or other (aside from getting killed, you mean?) so that night they go wandering into the jungle alone with flashlights, looking for, well, whatever it is they weren’t meant to see. And darned if Ann’s instincts don’t prove correct, because guys in buggy-style jeeps come tearing after them. Running from them, Ann finds a hidden pile of metal cases, all buzzing ominously. Then the guys in the jeeps show up and shoot her in the shoulder, but then the jeep guys are driven off by more of the Shadow People. As Ann sinks into unconsciousness, a swarm of bees coalesces around her…

Next thing, she’s comatose in a local hospital, and an associate of hers, Dr. North (David Naughton), is examining her charts. Her gunshot wound has healed amazingly fast, and between the lab report of an “unknown toxin” and the welts left by the beestings, North’s makes the intuitive leap that something in the beestings helped her heal faster! Being a fine capitalist kind of fellow, he immediately sees dollar signs in front of his eyes, and heads out into the jungle to find whatever it is that stung Ann.

Meanwhile, Ann’s estranged and soon-to-be-ex husband Martin (Craig Sheffer) arrives from New York, both to see how she is and to show the world as soon as she wakes up why she walked out on him: He’s an ass. He’s paranoid, insulting, and confrontational. Mostly, though, Ann left because she says he’s too selfish to be a good father, and she’s ready for a baby. Their meeting is so terse, Martin decides to immediately turn around and head right back to New York. (Dude, that’s an awfully long flight to get back on. Maybe you ought to see the sights or something while you’re there.)

Just for fun, the movie then clues us in to some of what’s going on. In a nutshell, Rutger Hauer is what’s going on. This, you should note, is not Young Rutger Hauer, of cleancut features and commanding presence. Blade Runner was twenty years ago, and he’s gotten heftier and saggier, and instead of “commanding” he just projects an aura of “crusty and mean.” He (as a character named “Ezekial,” and no, I don’t know whose idea the spelling was) is leading the buggy-jeep boys in a project of wiping out recalcitrant native villages with — killer bees! Selectively-bred killer bees, that is; deadlier in their sting, with a lifespan of about one week. One might think that such a specialized, custom-made insect would be valuable enough that they would have tight control on where they leave their crates, but obviously not…

Awful lot of bees in one case. They must have studied with those Volkswagen clowns.

…Because the next time we see Dr. North, he’s having one such crate loaded into the baggage compartment of a plane headed to New York, visions of sugarplums all dancing in his head. Why, he’s so intent on taking the bees to New York as his remarkable “discovery,” he doesn’t stop to think that bees don’t come in sealed metal crates. In other words, someone has already “discovered” your discovery, Doc.

Ann and Raka try to retrace their steps in the woods to figure out who shot at them and how she survived (after all, the “stumbling about like ninnies” tactic worked so well for them last time); meanwhile our planeful of victims starts filling up for the second plot. As luck would have it, Martin is taking the same flight. Also along is Adam (Adam Wylie), designated geek with glasses and a keyboard and everything; and two surfer girls, one of whom, Sandy (Lisa Wilhoit), thinks that she’s going to get a surfboard on as carry-on luggage. That surfboard is important, because it’s not well-secured when it’s tossed in the baggage compartment at the last minute, and when the plane hits severe turbulence in its first twenty minutes after takeoff, the surfboard bashes into the bee crate and cracks it open…

So while Ann and Raka are tracking down the Shadow People, people are mysteriously going into convulsions and comas aboard the plane one by one. When Dr. North gets stung by one of his own bees (O Phortune, thou art so phickle), Martin becomes the de facto leader of everything south of the cockpit door as the pilot tries to get permission to bring his plane down somewhere. Alas, no, because Ann has figured out that North took a crate of bees aboard the plane, and calls Scott at the State Department, and, well, I already told you that Scott turns out to be a bad guy, right? (Ann’s all upset about the prospect of the bees getting loose in New York and beginning to breed. Yet in all of her panicking about that, no one ever mentions a queen bee — as in, “Is there a queen bee in North’s box?”) In fact, Scott’s been telling other governments that there’s an ebola-like virus aboard the plane, which is the one-line justification for the feature’s original title, Flying Virus.

Oh, and Ezekial’s running around having villages blown up and people shot so he can track down these Shadow People. I say “running around,” but it’s remarkable how much of the movie Rutger Hauer is seated: Sitting in his command center, flying in a chopper, lounging in a deck chair while his underlings shoot up a village and threaten the local shaman to get information. That jetlag to Brazil is a bummer, isn’t it, Rutger? (Several extra explosions shown here are actually from Rambo: First Blood Part 2, but they’re integrated well enough into the action that the only reason to suspect that they’re stock footage in the first place is, Dude, there’s no way this production had enough money for THAT many throwaway explosions.)

All the best hair care products come from the Amazon, you know.

When Ann and Raka finally track down the Shadow People, they find that their leader is a white man who calls himself “Savior,” a Western doctor who went all native, played by Duncan Regehr, one of my favorite “Who?” actors. You might remember him as Charles, the Visitor brought in to whip things into shape on the V TV series. You might remember him as the star of the Family Channel’s Zorro TV series fifteen years ago. Heck, you just might remember him from his Trek appearances listed below. (If you’re Canadian, you may even remember him from the old series Matt and Jenny, starring a young Megan Follows.) But you probably don’t remember him at all for anything. That’s okay; I do.

I mentioned the high point, waaay back at the beginning. The low point is probably when the bees aboard the plane make it through the blanket-and-duct-tape barrier set up between first class and coach to keep them in the back half of the plane. (”No, you may not upgrade!”) The momentary hero is bitchy Sandy, who grabs a fire extinguisher and knocks them out of the air, screaming, “You want a piece of me? Eat that!” etc. Let this scene serve as a cautionary tale for all casting directors: You may find an actress to play a bitchy role who’s just perfect. That’s not because she’s a good actress; that may be because she’s bitchy in real life. If you plan on having her do anything non-bitchy and not be horrendously bad, better double-check before you hand her a contract.

And while we’re on the subject of being bitchy, I’ve got to let out a little myself. (Ooh, nice segue!) The CGI bees don’t look too shabby; they’re a bunch of dark little dots that buzz around while actors swat the air. But the CGI airplane, used consistently throughout the film, is incredibly bad. What’s worse, there’s no reason for it to be. We may not have model bees that look good on film, but we have model airplanes, right? You go down to the hobby store, get a snap-together model, and film it; if you really feel the need to pay a CGI techie, you shoot it on a rod arm and use CG to remove the arm and composite it against the background. I can accept a lot of things, but a plane that looks worse than a Supernintendo graphic isn’t one of them.

In the end, just about everyone survives, thanks to the toxicological quirk that a dozen beestings apparently have no more ill effect than a single sting. And since Savior has an antidote serum/repellent (made from poison dart frog venom, oddly enough), everyone who didn’t actually die comes back just fine. Plus all the bad guys die. And the State Department’s nefarious plan to make the highway a cross-country one by wiping out indigenous peoples is headed off.

Hey, is that Mario?

Oh, and in the middle of all the turmoil and panic and general brouhaha, Martin declares that he’s finally ready to have a kid. Yeesh. I’ve remarked before upon a particular lazy plot pattern which runs like this: “Troubled adolescent learns about duty, love, and adulthood through his/her bond with a _____” (fill the blank with whale/bear/gorilla/dolphin/seal/whatever). The grownup version is “A marriage on the rocks is renewed when the couple has to cope with ____” (a hostage situation/nuclear armageddon/alien attack/a swarm of killer bees).

When it was finally over, I was still waiting for an epilogue which showed bitchy Sandy realizing that the entire hell-in-the-air episode was caused by her damned surfboard.

And just think how much of the plot could have been avoided if that first Shadow Person had known the Portuguese word for “bee.”

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 121, plus one black panther and a fragillion bees
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 58
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• upset fruitcarts: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek:
  • Duncan Regehr (”Savior”) played “Ronin” in the TNG episode “Sub Rosa,” and had a recurring role on DS9 as “First Minister Shakaar Edon”