Overrated and overhyped

Charming and brutal

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Once again the disaster-movie format is given the TV movie treatment, this time in the form of a thriller about a deadly virus spreading across the world. Think OUTBREAK, except done on a low budget and without much skill.The problem with Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America is the usual problem that television movies face: there's not one jot of originality to be found anywhere in the production. The whole look and feel of the movie is predictable, with tired actors saying their tired lines half-heartedly and with the minimum of effort. Disaster films should be all about the panic, but this one's frankly dull.As usual, there's a certain frank appeal in seeing which actors are slumming it in which production, and this one features a couple. Stacy Keach manages to come away unscathed as he's in a relatively minor supporting role, but what happened to Joely Richardson? She must have been desperate to sign up for this.Genre fans expecting the worst may find this mildly entertaining at times - there's a certain verve, inherited from E.R., to the medical scenes - but you'll need to be in a forgiving mood to really enjoy it.

Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America: 3 out of 10: This movie is both funny and sad. The funny part is fairly obvious as this certainly isn't a sober look at a possible impending crisis. This is a modern version of The Swarm. And much like those killer bees (and the so called killer bee crisis that prompted them) Bird Flu has joined a pantheon of media inspired end of the world scenarios (SARS, Y2K, Global Warming) that simply refuse to actually come about.The sad part is the blatant attempt of the filmmakers to inspire panic. Disease pandemics historically were fairly common after all people didn't all die in their forties from heart disease. Even recent pandemics such as AIDS mirrors the old fashioned VD crisis (Think syphilis) that used to kill more soldiers than bullets.The flu pandemic of the early twenties was a nasty business killing millions but honestly life went on. I wonder if our over dramatic media and their power hungry government allies would allow life as normal today.The movie itself swerves wildly from fairly competent scenes (Triage in grand Central Station) to the ridiculous (Rednecks try to ambush national guardsman in Manhattan).The scenarios themselves are fairly useless as the filmmakers can't seem to decide exactly how contagious the bird flu is or for that matter whether the symptoms are an Ebola style crash or simply a long illness. Indeed one scene will show everyone in bio-hazard suits and the next will have nobody even wearing a mask.The film also patently refuses to actually give any practical advice regarding what to do in a Bird Flu crisis. (Outside of wash your hands, what no duct tape?) The acting and directing are competent for a TV movie but the script is all over the map. Last the movie has a strangely non-exponential death total running on the bottom of the screen. Just like the Swarm did.

Bird flu in America was relatively accurate according to the local conference on emergency management I went to this year. The thing we need to watch for is the first human to human transmission and then all bets are off. The synthesizing of vaccines is right on. Would take months after the flu was identified. Masks are used to keep things in, not to keep things out, so they are relatively useless. Most cases will be caught by touching things infected people have touched and then spreading it to your orifices and open cuts. I never touch my eyes or anything that goes in my mouth without first washing my hands and I have avoided several common flu's out this year. Money is the absolute worst thing to handle. The movie itself, like I said, was relatively accurate. The acting was good and the special effects were good too. For a low budget movie, it was well worth the watch if you want an intro to how a bad pandemic would operate.

This movie was so dramatic and I hated it. It not only scared me, it made me want to get in a fetal position and cry. Making someone that is not truly a big deal into something everyone is going to die from caused the plot to be so unrealistic. It is good if you want to scare someone perhaps, lets kill all the birds and I guess we will all be fine? I am very scared now and may simply have to start a support group for the viewers of this movie. It was so well done that it scared almost everyone in my household, sometimes you felt it was so bazaar that it could never happened; I believe that it cannot. Therefore, I think this movie was extremely ridiculous and felt totally unnecessary making America worry about a threat that has a very little chance of occurring.