Self-isolate with a local virus epidemic drama

If any of the national broadcasters had scheduled a virus epidemic thriller, you can be certain they’d have pulled it by now for fear of offending anyone, anywhere. But it appears that Netflix subscribers are made of sterner stuff. Among all the new releases in the streaming service’s current movie top ten is a film that’s 25 years old.

Scarily, Wolfgang Petersen’s 1995 flick Outbreak sees diddy Dustin Hoffman in a hazmat suit as the only person standing between a killer bug and the USofA. If that doesn’t make you poop your pants, try the genuinely terrifying book on which Outbreak is based: Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone.

But if you want to enjoy virus terror a little closer to home while you’re in self-isolation, try Val Guest’s little-known 1963 drama 80,000 Suspects. A minor apocalypse flick from the director of The Day the Earth Caught Fire and The Quatermass Xperiment, it envisions the outbreak of a smallpox epidemic in Bath. There’s also a little bit of Bristol – namely the former HTV/TWW studio on Bath Road in Brislington. The film actually makes great use of the Georgian City and is beautifully photographed in monochrome Cinemascope by Arthur Grant, who went on to becomes Hammer’s most prolific cinematographer.

The opening shot comprises a pan from the Abbey to the Pump Rooms, where lots of posh medical folk are grooving at a New Year’s Eve Party. One tipsy character then makes her way to the ‘Great Roman Bath’ (before it underwent a makeover) and dives in fully clothed. The Theatre Royal is the scene of one of the earliest outbreaks and the Assembly Rooms are converted into an emergency clinic. Other locations include the Bath Chronicle offices and, inevitably, the Royal Crescent. This being Bath, virtually none of the architecture has changed over the last half century or so, though the fashions, cars and social mores underline L.P. Hartley’s ‘foreign country’ quote. Yep, those doctors really are chain-smoking on the wards. Interestingly, Guest arrived with mountains of fake snow but didn’t have to use any of it since he was filming over the winter of 1962/63 – one of the coldest of the 20th century.

80,000 Suspects is available on DVD and blu-ray on the Network label. You can also stream the film on the BFI player here.

Not terrifying enough for you? Here’s our pick of the best (and worst) virus thrillers to watch from underneath the duvet with an industrial tub of hand-sanitiser by your side and the door barricaded using 20,000 bog rolls. Note: we do not pretend that this is a comprehensive list. Sorry if your favourite has been missed.

Outbreak (1995)

Back home after a spell in the African rainforest, unlikely virologist Dustin Hoffman tells his ex-wife Rene Russo of his fears that it may already be too late to prevent a deadly bug reaching the Land of the Free. And sure enough, the folks in a small Californian town start coming over all dead. But can Dustin trace the source of the infection, cook up an anti-serum, perform a handful of daredevil helicopter stunts, and figure out why his boss Morgan Freeman and callous general Donald Sutherland seem to know more than they’re letting on, while simultaneously patching up his broken marriage? For a European director working in Hollywood, Wolfgang Petersen assimilated the requisite gung-ho, Yankocentric worldview with remarkable ease. Sutherland gets all the best dialogue and, by playing the role strictly for laughs in contrast to Hoffman’s po-facedness, manages to steal the film from under his generously proportioned nose. The romantic sub-plot is one of the most useless examples of its type, and the whole thing mutates from bio-detection into brash, efficiently directed action-adventure during the ludicrous concluding half-hour. But as mainstream Hollywood hokum goes it’s infectiously entertaining, quite conceivably for all the wrong reasons.

Contagion (2011)

Steven Soderbergh fashions an old-skool, multi-character all-star disaster movie that begins with the death – and agreeably grisly autopsy – of Gwyneth Paltrow. It’s centred on what is arguably the most likely cause of mankind’s demise: a global pandemic spreading rapidly through increasingly mobile and dense populations. Soderbergh’s chief innovation is to explore the impact of the internet on a swiftly evolving situation. While it was about time that film-makers lifted the blogging/twittering rock to take a critical look at those unappealing bugs scuttling about in the darkness – The Anti-Social Network, if you will – you’d have hoped they’d find someone a little less one-dimensional than a mad-eyed, self-aggrandising Jude Law in 9/11 ‘truther’ mode, plausibly filling the information vacuum with self-serving conspiracy theory bullshit and finding himself elevated by the dinosaur media to the status of respected commentator purely because he has 12 million credulous ‘unique visitors’.

Train to Busan (2016)

Obviously, we could fill this list with zombie movies, but we’ll limit ourselves to just this brilliant one. Go here for our full review.

Blindness (2008)

Fernando Meirelles’ harrowing adaptation of Nobel laureate Jose Saramago’s allegorical novel is a flawed yet interesting film that’s certain to disappoint those lured by the sci-fi premise. When people start to succumb to a mysterious epidemic of ‘white blindness’, the authorities round up the blind and dump them in a grim abandoned mental institution, where social order swiftly breaks down (it’s moral blindness, see?). Miraculously unaffected Julianne Moore feigns blindness to avoid separation from her afflicted hubby and helps to turn their ward full of stereotypes (the kid, the ‘ho, the wise old black man, etc) into a working democracy. But autocratic bartender Gael Garcia Bernal’s ward has all the food. Robbery and rape ensue. There are plenty of problems with this, not the least of which is why Moore’s character doesn’t intervene earlier to prevent atrocities. Meirelles adds to the heavy-handedness by fiddling with the focus ring and flooding the screen with white light, but Moore contributes a typically gutsy performance, and there’s some sly humour plus a nod to Dawn of the Dead before the soggy, unsatisfactory ending.

Black Death (2010)

Bristolian director Chris Smith attempts a dark period drama in the tradition of those great British masterpieces The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General, crossed with Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God. Not only does he pull it off successfully, but Black Death also benefits from unlaboured contemporary resonances concerning the toxic blend of religious fanaticism and the ever-present threat of an infectious disease pandemic. It’s 1348 and plague is sweeping the land. But rumours have spread of a village beyond the marsh that is led by a necromancer and remains free of disease. So the bishop dispatches a ragtag bunch of torturers and mercenaries led by fanatical knight Sean Bean (on fine scowling form) to investigate. Black Death looks terrific, taking full advantage of its Sachsen-Anhalt locations. The refreshingly non-CGI battle, torture and crucifixion scenes are nasty and realistic without being gratuitous, and there’s a splendidly macabre moment of necromancy in the marsh that rivals anything from Hollywood for real spookiness. Dario (Wilderness) Poloni’s intelligent script skilfully muddies the ‘good vs evil’ waters and is treated with suitable commitment by the excellent cast.

The Andromeda Strain (1970)

It’s SARS from beyond the stars in Robert Wise’s solemn adaptation of Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton’s virus thriller.

12 Monkeys (1995)

Terry Gilliam’s unlikely box office hit stars Bruce Willis as James Cole, a convict from the future who’s sent back into his past to trace the source of a lethal virus that has devastated the world’s population. But instead of reaching Philadelphia 1996, he lands up in Baltimore 1990, where he’s diagnosed as schizophrenic by psychiatrist Madeleine Stowe and thrown into a mental hospital beside hyperactive Brad Pitt. Pulled back into his own time, flung into WWI, then dumped at last in 1996, Cole begins to wonder if he is indeed losing his grip on reality . . . Storywise, the film keeps you guessing with its balance of conspiracy theories, red herrings and whodunnit mystery. It may stumble from time to time over its own inner logic, but it’s an odd, engaging, eccentric creation that’s set apart by Gilliam’s ever-brilliant visual skills and a mood of tragic inevitability that’s rare in a Hollywood movie.

Doomsday (2008)

Brit director Neil (The Descent) Marshall’s daft, sprawling post-apocalypse thriller references everything from 28 Days Later and Escape From New York to Mad Max and beyond. A prologue establishes that the nasty Reaper virus polished off Glasgow in 2008. The Brits reacted in the only sensible manner by rebuilding Hadrian’s Wall and sealing off the Scots to stew. But 30 years on, the virus has appeared in London. So one-eyed heroine (geddit Snake Plissken fans?) Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) and her band of stereotypes are dispatched oop north in search of a cure. Naturally, the stroppy feral Scots are none too pleased to see them, so Sinclair responds in the traditional manner of modern movie heroines by stripping down to her tight-fitting vest to kick serious quantities of raggedy Tartan ass. There’s much gore, but also clunky expositional dialogue aplenty, a fair few ropy performances, and a total surrender to daftness when Malcolm McDowell eventually turns up.

Cabin Fever (2002)

A cabin in the woods, gratuitous teen nudity and a flesh-eating virus – what’s not to like? This is the best of the millennial glut of back-to-basics, refreshingly irony-free horror flicks, in which self-confessed nerd Eli Roth manages to echo all of his influences from The Evil Dead to Last House on the Left (from which he lifts the incongruously sappy songs). What he doesn’t do is wink knowingly at the audience or resort to silly rubber bogeymen to supply the shocks. The film assembles a quintet of teen stereotypes and packs them off for a vacation in a remote cabin in Deliverance country, where they soon succumb to the hermit-borne virus. Microbiologists may scoff at the virus’s curious properties, while the script requires these characters to behave with a degree of stupidity that’s remarkable even by American movie teen standards. But Roth delivers where it counts, with a cynical dissection of group dynamics (the Nice Girl gets infected first and the poor, besotted Sensitive Guy has to finish her off), plus a handful of superbly executed grossout moments which include the most revolting foreplay sequence ever committed to celluloid.

Carriers (2009)

With no CGI eye-candy to distract viewers from hackneyed plots, film-makers pursuing the viral pandemic variation on the end-of-mankind genre need original storylines and compelling characters to hold our attention. Unfortunately, the Pastor brothers’ Carriers has neither. Having taken the brave decision to adopt a low-key, downbeat approach (no hordes of foaming infected or cheap jump-out-of-your-seat jolts here; it’s not even technically a zombie flick), they give us a quartet of stock characters facing some over-familiar, heavily telegraphed moral dilemmas. The Pastors don’t bother with the details of their pandemic as they dump us in a car with four survivors fleeing across rural Texas and New Mexico. Chris (Captain Kirk) Pine gets the alpha male asshole role as Brian, the de facto leader of the group, who insists that if anyone gets infected they’re already dead and should be abandoned. This is all rather slow and predictable, with people croaking in pretty much the order and manner you’d expect. It could have done with more of the neat satirical touches, such as the radio evangelist who expires on air while proclaiming that only God’s chosen people will survive.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

The apes were the worst thing about the original 1968 Planet of the Apes movie, being actors in unconvincing rubber masks; here, it’s the humans who are two-dimensional and the extraordinary apes who dominate, thanks to advances in digital technology and another brilliant ‘performance capture’ turn by Andy Serkis. Taking its cue from 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (don’t bother – it’s rubbish), this origin story adapts the mad scientist template to have boffin James Franco developing an Alzheimer’s cure for an Evil Corporation, which he tests on little Caesar (Serkis) and tries out illegally on his dear old befuddled dad, John Lithgow. Freda (Slumdog Millionaire) Pinto gets the thankless hottie girlfriend role. Despite appeasing the nerds with a couple of references to the first film, Brit director Rupert Wyatt clearly understands that the boring humans aren’t the real story here, concentrating instead on the impressive apes. Serkis’s expressive performance quite brilliantly evinces Caesar’s developing intelligence, his sense of betrayal, and his cunning in uniting fellow imprisoned apes for the big rebellion, without compromising the chimp’s simian nature.

Pic credit: Network/BFI