Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America

Many similarities in this film made in 2006 with what really happened in the world starting in the Fall-Winter of 2019. That will be a good reason to watch it. Joely Richardson and Stacy Keach are another reason to watch the movie. It's well made but has lengths that will be harder to digest.

Look through the reviews. Those from 2006-2018 are in the 3-5 range. Those from 2021 (like this one) see it differently. We've all seen the cheesy post-apocolypse or post nuclear war movies or killer bee movies. What they all have in common is that there is no reality to compare them to--so they could be accurate predictions or just pure bunk.

I'm sure those who saw this in 2006+ thought "Pure bunk. That would never happen!" I just watched it in spite of its 4.7 IMDB rating, as I was curious. Wow! OK, the movie is pure made-for-TV B-movie fare, but what were the writers thinking? Worst case scenario? Or did they have gifted insight? The almost unbelievable accuracy of the predictions is enough reason to watch this.

Most thought this movie was so far fetched when it came out in 2006. Then... 2020 happened and - reviews changed drastically. Not so far fetched anymore. We lived this nightmare.

What may be "fiction" now may be FACT in years to come. As bird flu in 2024 has now been contracted by humans, we'll see what the future holds...2025 is already off to a bad start.

We hope it's not a repeat of Covid with forced "immunizations" and wide-spread panic with rights being taken away. No one in 2006 thought this would EVER come true and yet it did.

Truth is stranger than fiction they say and if the past is anything to learn from, I hope we learned enough lessons in 2020.

In Guangdong province, China, numerous birds infected with the H5N1 virus are being killed, but it may be too late to stop the disease from spreading. At least one man is sick at a nearby factory being visited by Ed Connelly of Richmond, Virginia, who is criticizing the factory's policies that are costing the company money (as far as we know, this has nothing to do with the disease).

As Connelly returns to the United States, we see extreme close-ups of the ways the disease is being spread by him to others on the plane. Soon after he gets back to Richmond, life appears normal but he is infecting others around him. He has no idea how sick he is.

Dr. Iris Varnack (Joely Richardson) is called to China, where 8 people have been infected by the bird flu virus. Correction--25 people. And the doctor there believes these cases, unlike others before, were passed from human to human rather than from bird to human. Dr. Varnack soon must inform the government that a pandemic worse than the 1918 Spanish Flu is a strong possibility. 300 million people could die worldwide (compared to 50 million in the earlier disaster).

Connelly becomes delusional and passes out in a store, and once doctors figure out what is wrong, all who visit him, including his wife Denise (Ann Cusack), must wear what look like space suits. By the first commercial break, the death toll is 125.

Soon, Connelly's neighborhood looks like a military installation, with a fence, complete with barbed wire, and armed military guards. Everyone there and in several other Richmond neighborhoods must stay in, depending on outsiders to get them the food and supplies they need. And as the epidemic worsens nationwide, the necessities of life become harder and harder to get.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services (Stacy Keach) communicates with the press. We are told the President addressed the nation, but we never see him.

Hospitals are soon overwhelmed with people who suspect they have the disease. We see treatment of the bird flu primarily through the eyes of one heroic nurse, Alma Ansen (Justina Machado), whose husband Curtis (David Ramsey) is in the military in Iraq--until his unit gets called back to the United States. Hospitals become terrible places, and before long, large buildings must be turned into auxiliary health care facilities.

The Connelly family becomes isolated from the world, though they do not have the disease. Or do they?

Periodically, we see a death count on the screen. People are dying so fast, though, that the count looks like the total sale display on a gas pump while you are filling up. The death toll goes from hundreds to thousands to many millions.

Virginia Governor Mike Newsome (Seth Cohen) is criticized for overdoing the quarantines and focusing on certain groups (the NAACP and ACLU, we are told, do not like his policies). He is told his efforts are doing no good to stop the disease's spread, but that doesn't really matter.

Life as we know it ceases to exist. The country is like a Third World nation, with people waiting in lines for everything they need, and lucky to get what they have. Black markets develop and crime increases (Remember the Rodney King verdict? Fortunately, we see this type of situation primarily in news footage). And people need other types of services from hospitals and the health care system--but this is just not readily available. Other problems develop that you might not have thought of. This situation is much worse than when polio was a problem (I'm not that old, by the way, but I've heard about it)--that's more like what I was led to expect if the bird flu became a problem.

The situation is not as grim in the second half. Life appears 'normal' in many scenes, though it is a 'new' normal. Denise Connelly's determination and compassion make the movie worth seeing, and a little more than just a 'disease of the week' movie. Scenes with Alma and Curtis also provide some welcome relief, though they both have their jobs to go back to.

I have to wonder why people stopped wearing space suits. There was no vaccine to begin with, and of course we had the obligatory controversies once one was found (there has to actually be a specific form of the disease to develop a vaccine for). My guess is they ran out of space suits and hoped they didn't need them. Of course, we are told some people just don't get sick.

The ending shows promise of a return to normal, but also impending gloom. IT MAY NOT BE OVER.

It is true that every version of the flu must have its own vaccine, and we don't know whether a vaccine for the current H5N1 virus will work if human-to-human transmission occurs. That part the movie probably got right. And people do have a tendency to overreact to threats such as this--where I live even the hint of snow means no bread or milk on grocery store shelves, so people's behavior here probably seemed realistic. But this movie just showed a quite exaggerated and terrifying look at what could happen. We may have been educated on some of the concerns a bird flu epidemic could bring--both consequences directly related to the flu, and the indirect results as well. Still, this looked overdone to me.

The autopsy on one victim was quite graphic. And we did see blood in a number of cases, because people with this disease cough up blood or bleed from the nose, at least in this version.

Stacy Keach gave the standout acting performance. Other actors were good at times, considering this was a TV-movie. Seth Cohen, Ann Cusack, Justina Machado and David Ramsey all had their moments.

Was it just a 'disease-of-the-week' movie? Probably, but it had its good moments.

Made-for-TV movies hold a dear place in my heart, for some reason I totally fail to grasp. There's just something I love about the inherent "B" quality that always seems to crop up in them. Not everybody sees it this way.

I gather from reading the other comments here that many of you tuned in hoping to see a movie. This is a common misconception about TV movies. You aren't really watching a movie, you're watching a two hour long episode in a TV series you will never see the rest of.

Actually, the last TV movie I saw about a pandemic disease was the multi-part adaptation of Stephen King's "The Stand," which came out embarrassingly well done. There was none of that here, but what, really, were you expecting? I have no idea how accurate the disease information in this movie is; I don't really care. The fact is that I've seen a fair amount of TV movies by ABC and CBS (none from NBC, though I hear there's one out this week) and I'd have to say that ABC makes a consistently better movie than CBS does.

CBS likes to make disaster movies. I saw BOTH "Category 6" and "Category 7" on CBS, and I'm glad to say that "Fatal Contact," though cheesy, is "Citizen Kane" compared to either of these. The characters here are fairly believable, the special effects were not overplayed (TV movies always have terrible special effects, and even their regular effects aren't that hot), and I even liked the ending. I felt it was satisfactory.

All told, TV movies are never that good. The case for most of them is that if they turned up in theaters, you would walk out and demand your money back. But with direct-to-TV productions everything's a little bit more freewheeling. Relax, and immerse yourselves in the the heavy-handed plots and shallow budgets of network feature films...