Sometimes, despite all of the hands involved in producing a contemporary major Hollywood movie, something sneaks through which resembles the work of demented mental patients. Virus is such a film. The first half-hour looks like something out of a campy 1940s sea adventure, as the crew of a small tugboat runs into a phony-looking typhoon. Donald Sutherland is the captain, the kind of cartoonish old salt one expects to have a brass telescope and a parrot on his shoulder, and his performance is one of the most ridiculous of the year. Some of the biomechanical creations are pretty impressive, as is the dangerous-looking stuntwork on admittedly unconvincing "raging seas," but the film is ultimately undone by a schizophrenic approach. Part of this is due to the seemingly huge gap between comic-book sensibilities (Virus was based on Chuck Pfarrer's popular Dark Horse series) and the sensibilities of the film's producers. Something got lost in the translation from page to screen, and that something was attitude. The result is a film that doesn't know whether it's a campy goof or serious horror, and ends up straddling the line between the two in truly peculiar fashion. There is a way to film offbeat comic books and maintain their unique styles, as Spawn demonstrated a few years back, but this is definitely not it. There's something compulsively watchable about Virus anyway, but it may be the same thing that keeps one's eyes glued to a train wreck. One just has to see exactly how bad it will get, and each ill-conceived new development only increases its jaw-dropping fascination.