Coming soon, to a theatre near you… is a movie so bad… so bizarre…
…that film critics are choosing to lick toilet seats in the hopes of getting sick instead of reviewing the film.
I present to you… CORONA.
A Movie Called Corona Has Been Made
With the Covid-19 virus spreading freely all over the world, there’s never been a better time to stay curled up in your room with a good movie.
And because some people want to relive the horror of the coronavirus in film form, many have had to turn to 2011’s Contagion, a film about a deadly airborne virus that spreads and kills within days.
Sounds like a nice uplifting film at such a time, no?
Well, the problem is that it’s quite an old film, and audiences wanted something new.
That’s when Canadian filmmaker Mostafa Keshvari stepped up to the plate to give audiences what they wanted – a film about the Covid-19 virus.
Unfortunately, it looks bad.
Really, really bad.
The Premise
The premise of the film is simple enough. A Chinese woman enters a lift filled with a group of people. She soon starts coughing, and panic and xenophobia ensures. The lights then go out, and everyone is trapped in the lift.
Now, I know you should never judge a film based on a trailer, but you can probably bet your cousin’s bicycle that it’s not going to be “Certified Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes.
Why it’s Bad
Firstly, the trailer looks like it was made by a teenager on Windows Movie Maker; bits of the movie have been clumsily compiled together, punctuated with cheesy lines in amateur looking fonts.
The first thing you see in the trailer, for example, is this:
Now, I’m not sure if you remember the trailer for Avengers: Endgame, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t start like this:
Aside from the hideously bad acting, some of the lines are just plain amusing.
The number one rule of filmmaking is to show, don’t tell, but this film makes its characters tell you everything that’s going on so the writer and director can have a nap in their dressing rooms.
For instance, the first line in the trailer is a woman saying “Do you understand that there is a virus going around in this building?”
Explicit exposition #FTW.
And the second line (from another woman) is “I didn’t know there’s a coronavirus in the building”.
From what I can infer, I think there’s a chance there’s a coronavirus in their building.
The Daily Hive reports that Keshvari wrote the film to help combat and confront xenophobia, which is why he uses an Asian person to be the “infected” one.
In the trailer, this xenophobia is represented by an old man in a wheelchair, who is so obviously xenophobic he might as well have written the word RACIST on his forehead.
Oh wait, he basically did that:
Yes, he literally has a swastika tattoo on his forehead.
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Maybe It Won’t Be So Bad?
To his credit, Keshvari wrote the film to combat xenophobia against Chinese people, and that is something to be admired.
Many Chinese nationals even here have faced prejudice from Singaporeans.
So, maybe, if we can stomach the bad acting and script, it may not be so bad after all. They say you should never judge a movie by its trailer, anyway.
Wait, is that pregnant woman actually giving birth in the freaking lift? Ok, forget what I said, this movie is going to be a disaster.
But if you die-die want to watch it, just wait a while: the director is now hoping to get it on streaming platforms.
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Netflix, if you take this movie I’ll unsubscribe immediately.
