Why do I keep getting stoned and seeing these incredibly gross movies? What is wrong with me? Last week Evil Dead made me barf. I’m not proud. This week my movie choices were either a movie about baseball which would have made me fall asleep or Antiviral, the debut feature by Brandon Croenenberg, son of one of the greatest horror directors of all time. So I bit the bullet and went back into the breach for you, dear reader.
Antiviral takes place in a dystopian future where the latest craze is celebrity diseases. People pay big bucks to come down with the same nasty stuff that their favorite stars do. The main guy, Syd, works at a firm that collects those germs and sells them. To make extra cash, he smuggles some of the infections out in his own body. That doesn’t sound smart to me, but what do I know? So he shoots himself up with a weird disease from a famous actress and it turns out to be a little more than he bargained for.
Brandon Croenenberg is, not surprisingly, into a lot of the same stuff his dad is in terms of bodies doing weird things and dealing with infections and transformations and stuff. Can you imagine the sex talks they mist have had growing up? What if your dad made movies about people getting off during car crashes and then him telling you about the birds and the bees? That’s so messed up.
This movie brings a lot of pretty gross ideas to the table but it doesn’t do a lot with them. There’s a bit about a store that uses celebrity genetic material to grow meat that’s disgusting enough to be its own movie. It’s obviously trying to make Big Statements about the Truth of Celebrity but the real world is already doing a perfectly good job of that.
Really you want to see this for the balls-out medical horror on display here. If you have a problem with syringes you don’t want to be anywhere near this movie. My kid’s got diabetes so I didn’t really give a crap but there were people really freaking out. It’s gross in a different way than Evil Dead was gross – it’s clinical and disturbing in a way that not many movies are. Go see it.
Disclaimer: I fixed all the spelling and grammar errors but left everything else in.