Love bug worm inspires Asian film

Asian film makers have completed filming about a movie inspired by the infamous Love Bug worm.

The celluloid outing, entitled Subject: I love you, stars US actress Briana Evigan and has finished filming on the streets of Manila, in the Philippines, ahead of an expected release next year. The title of the film is the same as the subject lines of emails infected by the infamous Love bug mass-mailing worm, which infected millions of computers and caused a huge strain on overloaded mail servers back in May 2000.

Evigan's incoherent explanation of the plot to MTV sheds little light on the film's direction beyond suggesting it might be a sort of rom com with computer viruses, and a sad ending.

You ever hear of the ‘I Love You Virus’? It’s based on that. It’s the American girl and the Filipino boy and I leave the Philippines and there’s not much internet or cell phone stuff going on at that time over there and he tries to track me down and his friends come up with an idea of him sending out a virus.

Computer security experts, such as Graham Cluley, express concern that the movie might make virus-writing appear cool or even sexy. Judging from the lameness of the plot there would seem to be little to fear from that score. All we can hope for is that the film is so bad it becomes worth seeing for its sheer awfulness, much like Battlefield Earth, for example.

Those interested in zombie rom-coms would do much better to check out Shaun of the Dead.

There's no word of whether the chief suspect in the spread Love Bug, Onel de Guzman, who was never charged because of a lack of relevant cybercrime laws in the Philippines at the time, will make a cameo appearance in the film (which is currently in post-production). The film was written and directed by filmmaker Francis dela Torre.

The film represents the latest entry to the Haxploitation genre, previous low-points of which have included the much derided Takedown, a "dramatisation" of the pursuit and capture of infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick. ®