What a waste of my time!!!

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

While ABC was making its epic The Day After and BBC its counterpart, Threads, NBC produced this low-budget but VERY effective sleeper.As noted in other reviews, its premise borrows from Orson Welles' infamous Mercury Theater production of War of the Worlds, adopting the format of a live TV "breaking news" broadcast.As others point out, it's dated, but only because it accurately reflects TV news in the early 1980's. The media has changed in the 30 years since it was broadcast - and some of the 'anchorperson' acting feels a little flat - but this is pre-9/11, where there was little precedent for such events.It's well-done, using low-budget local news format to its best advantage to deliver story and drama without expensive production values. The science, while imperfect, is convincing and pretty close to the mark, and the 'breaking news' format allows for 'experts' to explain technical stuff without dumbing anything down or insulting the audience's intelligence.An interesting sub-plot is how it delves into the media's commercial hype and influence on the events it covers.I finally obtained a DVD of this - not very good quality, obviously transferred and edited from a VHS of live broadcast, but you have to take what you can get. Curiously, the lower quality isn't bothersome - if anything, it adds to the feeling of authenticity.It's far from a perfect movie, but for a modest production, it is quite ambitious and accomplished a lot.Highly recommended.

It is rare to see a movie that both fascinates for its subject matter and makes your skin crawl because the reality of the drama is so plausible. This movie was a bland warning of how terrorists might infiltrate suddenly; even with recent history, it still has impact. The dramatization was so credible, I'm surprised copycat formats haven't followed. The only movies I can remember that came so close to reality prior to Special Bulletin were Kent State and Attica. Those movies noted history; this one brought out "history-in-the-making". It is easy to see how viewers in South Carolina who were unaware they were seeing a movie, despite disclaimers, panicked. One of our guests that night gave it a "five-star 'wow'" rating. I'm glad we taped it; I haven't seen it on TV since (mid-80s). I wish it would come out on DVD.

...simply the best TV movie I've ever seen. I was 10 when it first aired, and I was forbidden to watch it. I finally did years later, and especially for a "made-for-TV" movie, this just totally is riveting, gripping, and even frightening entertainment. Amazing realism that fans of the style (think "The Blair Witch Project" mixed in with some "War of the Worlds" employed for most of this film) will totally get lost in. There have been plenty of pretty bad "nuclear disaster" flicks since 1983...go rent this and you'll have a hard time being able to even closely compare any others to this. It may be a bit of a search for this one, but it's worth it. I can honestly say I'm glad my parents didn't let me watch this at age 10, or I'd have dug myself a bunker and never come out!

I think Special Bulletin has to rank amongst the half dozen finest made for TV movies of all time; this movie won several Emmy awards in 1983. This movie was years ahead of its time in showing how the media would handle a live breaking story, including catchy graphics and theme music, and lots of experts giving their opinions as the crisis unfolds. It was clearly inspired by Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast, and NBC had to run disclaimers to let people know that this was a realistic depiction of a fictional event.A group of disgruntled American nuclear scientists build their own nuclear device and tow it into Charleston, SC, Harbor on a tugboat. Their motive was to get the US Government to dismantle all the nuclear weapons in all the military bases and ships in the Charleston area, hundreds of missiles in all. In a gunfight with the authorities, the terrorists kidnapped a reporter and cameraman who were covering the gunfight and got a little too close to the action. With threats of killing the journalists, the terrorists are able to get their message across on live TV and we the viewers are suddenly inside the tugboat watching the events inside the boat unfold as well as seeing the news network covering the story in a way that has become familiar in this era of instant 24/7 news.This movie makes a sly condemnation of TV news in general in the way live breaking news is covered and sensationalized, some would say over-sensationalized. I highly recommend this movie.