La morte nera

Entertaining movie with some prophetic truth mixed in..

This is a fantastic television movie! I saw this actually in school. It was shown by our science teacher when we were talking about diseases. As i remember it, it was well acted, and well written. If you liked Outbreak then you should like this. The basic plot is a group of scientists trying to stop the spreading of the plague.

I was pleasantly surprised by this flim. Kate Jackson was a bit wooden, but overall the acting was pretty good. The scenes early on when the young woman becomes ill, and eventually succumbs, were great. It is horrifying to think what would actually happen if a plague like this really struck a large city like New York. And SARS is nothing compared to what this sort of epidemic would be like. It seemed to be well researched, and the reactions of the poeple involved seemed realistic.

*** out of five

As an epidemiologist, I say any movie that features an epidemiologist as heroine can't be all bad!

Actually, the disease scenario -- pneumonic plague spread person-to-person in a crowded city after introduction by a traveler just back from California, where she came into contact with a plague-infected ground squirrel -- is not implausible. Indeed this is the kind of scenario that bioterrorism planning is designed to detect, respond to and control. The best scene in the movie is the one in which the mayor's assistant -- this is 1991, mind you -- confidently looks in the city's emergency plan for the section on how to deal with epidemics and finds -- nothing. I like the way the movie shows the public health workers as dedicated, taking personal risks (as so many health care workers did to care for people with SARS), and ethical. What is particularly unrealistic is the way the public health workers can just walk into a hospital and start managing patients.

Also, this is the most wooden performance ever by Jerry Orbach in a minor role.