Tuesday, May 9th, 8/7 Central - "ABC presents a world premiere event that's one step ahead of the headlines."

The producers of ABC's May sweeps panic button thriller FATAL CONTACT: BIRD FLU IN AMERICA have described what they present in this film as a "plausible worst case scenario." If they honestly believe that then they've got cajones so humongous that we're going to need Bruce Willis and the world's best deep drilling team to blow them up before they wipe out life on this planet. The avian flu may very well be a legit concern but this movie is only slightly less over the top than, oh, say, INFRAMAN.

To call this one of the most shameless pieces of cinematic exploitation I have ever seen in my entire life would be an understatement. To say that I loved every second of it wouldn't be completely accurate, but it would probably be closer to reality than anything in the movie itself. I actually feel compelled to applaud the filmmakers; if you're going to make a scare flick designed to play on the public's worst fears about a potentially dangerous threat then you might as well go all out, and they sure as hell pulled out all the stops for this one. This a film that lets you know exactly what kind of movie it's going to be in its opening credits as footage of birds flying through the air is accompanied by the sort of musical score one should here in the opening credits of an EXORCIST or OMEN rip-off. From there it's off to the races. The morals of the story are threefold: bird flu is unstoppable, mankind will persist, and the French are assholes.

The plot to FATAL CONTACT: BIRD FLU IN AMERICA (What is it with modern filmmakers and their love affair with the colon?) is primarily divided up into four (sometimes) intertwining subplots: Nip/Tuck's Joely Richardson as a disease specialist tracking the virus and being as gloomy as humanly possible, the Governor of Virginia and his excessive reaction to the outbreak beginning in his state, the trials and tribulations of the quarantined Virginia family whose father was the one responsible for initially spreading and first to die from for the disease, and a dedicated Latina nurse dealing with the overwhelming pandemic in New York City.

Now I'll sit here and tell you that for the most part this is a perfectly fine film from an acting and direction standpoint. The problem is that the screenplay is just one sensationalistic scene after another designed solely to exploit every pandemic fear possible. The producers claim that it isn't meant to be exploitive, but to open people's eyes to the threat of bird flu. Either they think we're all fools to believe that or they're fooling themselves. I mean we're talking about a movie that periodically displays a death toll counter at the bottom of the screen telling us what the current body count is at that point in the film.

Businessman Ed Conley is visiting a plant in China that just happens to be located at the epicenter of where the bird to human transfer of avian flu is beginning. Sure enough, one of the employees is coughing an awful lot next to the unsuspecting American. This lead to an abuse of the 24-style split screen technique as we are shown Ed's trip home and how every single thing he makes contact with puts others at risk of contracting the virus he's unknowingly spreading. Did you know that bird flu looks like old time underwater mines? You will since we're actually shown extreme close-ups of the bird flu microbes on everyday objects infecting people.

Now correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't the alcohol from a martini sterilize the germs? I'd swear I learned something about the sterilizing properties of alcohol back in science class a long time ago, and yet here's a guy in this movie catching the virus from finishing the infected man's cocktail.

We're then introduced to Joely Richardson's character, Dr. Iris Varnack, on a balcony smoking a cigarette after having sex with her boyfriend. Joely Richardson is a fine actress but I really do not know how to describe her despondent performance here other than to say it is perfectly in tune with the film's tone. They should have just named her character Dr. Doomsayer because every facial expression, every syllable out of her mouth implies an uncomfortably nervous demeanor of certain doom. Hell, she's shown acting like someone in desperate need of Zoloft even before she gets word of the pandemic.

We're then off to Richmond, Virginia where infected Ed is shown enjoying his son's little league game. Every physical contact he makes is shown in slow motion with even more menacing music for added effect.

Meanwhile in Washington, D. C., dreary Dr. Varnack meets up with Stacy Keach, playing the Secretary for Health & Human Resources, for a meeting with the Department of Health & Human Resources regarding the bird flu outbreak currently sweeping China. There's just something about the sound of her name "Varnack" that made me wish she'd have started this presentation by holding up an envelope to her head and saying, "20 million dead." Anyway, she projects global loss of life at 150 - 350 million dead. I told you she was Miss Doom & Gloom.

Another official in the room makes the comment that avian flu is going to be like Hurricane Katrina hitting every city in the country. You heard the man. In case of bird flu, everyone get on your roof and wait to be rescued! Someone else makes a comment about people sitting in their homes being scared and looking for real answers and solutions. Like this movie is going to help.

No sooner does Stacy Keach predict that America should have a few weeks before the virus reaches our shores, a very sickly looking Ed begins totally bird fluing right there in a department store. Sweating heavily, looking pale, hallucinating, massive nose bleed... Does he have bird flu or the ebola virus? It sure seems more like ebola than any form of the flu I've ever heard of because after dying in the hospital, Dr. Varnack performs the autopsy and says that he essentially drowned in his own blood after his lungs were eaten away. I believe she may have said something about how it won't be this bad for most people that contract the virus but then the worst case scenario is what this film is all about so expect a lot of bloody chins to come.

Stacy Keach then holds a televised press conference to announce the arrival of avian flu, precautions people need to take, and that there is no need to panic, which in movies like this is code language for "Everyone panic!" All throughout the film we'll get global and local news reports regarding the pandemic courtesy of such phony TV networks as WWEN, as in "WWEN are we all going to die?" The one thing all these phony news networks have in common is that they all have the world's slowest tickers crawling - and I do mean crawling - across the bottom of the screen.

Back in Richmond, the Governor of Virginia has gone into a full blown panic and ordered the fencing off of Ed Conley's neighborhood with barb-wire fences and military checkpoints. Quarantined citizens are distributed a little food and water to last them a few days yet are not allowed to leave the quarantine zone despite having been established to be virus-free. This will lead to subplots within a subplot regarding Ed Conley's surviving family members (The wife that falls into a deep depression, the teen daughter outraged by the quarantine, and the young son that will come down with the virus yet miraculously survive with little explanation as to how or why), an old lady neighbor that nearly starves to death after running out food and water, and a showdown with others at the only supermarket within the quarantine zone to receive a new shipment of food and supplies - think the day after Thanksgiving shopping spree but with surgical masks.

Dr. Varnack confronts the Governor and argues what he's doing is making things worse by increasing paranoia within the general populace and that quarantining people in this manner will do nothing to stop the spread of the virus. The Governor's response to this accusation: "Doctor, maybe you've spent too much time in Africa or Bangladesh or wherever... Maybe you're used to people sitting back and accepting their fate, but that's not what we do in this country. What we do is fight with every weapon in our arsenal." Hey, you know what else we do in this country? We scare the shit out of people for ratings!

The Governor considers what he's doing to be making tough choices and shows Iris the door rather than listen to reason because, after all, if he listened to reason then it wouldn't be much of a movie. Actually, he couldn't physically show her the door because their face-to-face meeting took place with a plane of glass between them since the Governor had already sealed himself, his family, his staff, and a bunch of other commonwealth of Virginia beaurocrats within their own personal biosphere of sorts in order to micromanage the situation without potentially exposing themselves to the virus. Oh, did I mention that his teenage son is a diabetic, the sort of diabetic that needs to inject himself with a shot of insulin directly into his kidney? Seriously diabetic person locked away within a hermetically sealed environment... Oh, you better believe this turns into a plot complication.

And then there's Alma, a Hispanic nurse working at a hospital in New York City that is becoming increasingly overrun with the sick and the panicked. She even gets to take part in the film's most offensively tasteless scene involving a man committing a murder-suicide with his own family at their first sign of the sniffles. "We're all going to die," the man standing over the body of the wife he just killed exclaims before he puts the gun to his own chin and pulls the trigger right in front of Alma. It was at that point, and keep in mind that this scene occurs fairly early in, that I truly realized that there was no depth that this film was not willing to sink to.

Alma's husband is a soldier that had been stationed in Iraq only to be sent home as the pandemic increases in order to serve as a hospital security guard. Apparently, he too had gotten sick while in Iraq but got over it. Again, no explanation as to how or why, which seems especially annoying since the film goes out of its way to establish that contracting bird flu is an agonizing death sentence that results in the destruction of the lungs and the vomiting of blood. All the stuff with Alma and her husband is the weakest sub-subplot in the whole movie. You keep expecting one of them to contract the disease and die but that never happens. Instead, they comfort one another by cuddling a lot. I believe they are supposed to represent a ray of hope amid all the death and calamity. Believe me, there's plenty of death and calamity:

Public gatherings banned in Moscow.

Bodies in Asia tossed onto bonfires like a scene out of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

Worldwide food, water, and supply shortages.

Random power outages throughout the States.

Nationwide protests against others citizens being quarantined.

Riots in the streets.

Dump trucks dumping thousands of garbage-bagged corpses into giant landfills.

Insurance companies filing for bankruptcy left and right.

Coffee now costs $19 a bag!

"These are dark times indeed," states a Chinese doctor. No kidding. A news report says 350,000 dead. Seconds later, we see the death count at over 2,500,000. I counted the death counter increasing by 500 people in a span of three seconds at one point. By the 45-minute mark, over two million people seemed to be dropping dead every week. Yes, the film keeps a number count of the passing weeks in addition to the death counter. A shot of the makeshift hospital for those sick in New York City looks like it came straight out of the famous scene of the battlefield wounded in GONE WITH THE WIND. Dark times indeed. At times the movie is like DAWN OF THE DEAD only the dead actually stay dead.

I must say that for a movie that takes itself so seriously and was made by people that insist that what's being shown is within the realm of possibility, there is no consistency when it comes to how contagious the disease is. Some people come into contact with those infected and don't get infected themselves. Some scenes have doctors and nurses dealing with the sick isolated behind sealed curtains with their only protection being surgical masks and rubber gloves where as others won't even enter a room with a sick person unless they're in a full biohazard suit. One scene late in the movie has a perfectly healthy man with no protection whatsoever sitting at his dying wife's bedside holding her hand with no concern raised by anyone about the possibility of him catching the bug from her.

"Confusion, outrage, and despair all over America" is reported by a news network, although I could argue that one could use those three words to describe how things are in this country on any given day with or without a deadly pandemic. The good news is that some avian flu vaccine is finally ready. The bad news is that there isn't enough for everyone, so poor Stacy Keach has to make the difficult decision as to who gets the vaccine and who doesn't. That's right, folks. Mike Hammer will decide if you live or die. Deal with it!

This brings us to my favorite scene in the whole film. By Week 12, New York City looks more like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. A National Guard convoy delivering a supply of avian flu vaccine is attacked Mad Max-style by a group of NASCAR dads in a junky semi-truck. The sight of machine gun-toting National Guardsmen (including Alma's husband) having to gun down guys in baseball caps and denim shirts as they stage an ill-conceived heist worthy of an episode of T.J. Hooker is golden.

Meanwhile, those bastards we call the French begin refusing to ship anymore vaccine to America, at least they do until the whole world comes together to impose crippling sanctions on France to get them to share the vaccine. I'm sure some senators would start calling them "freedom fries" again over this if they weren't too busy cowering in a bunker somewhere.

Signs of hope finally begin emerging during the last 20 minutes as it appears the pandemic has finally hit a plateau. This seems to be the hope and humanity section of the film where the worst appears to be over, people help others pick up the pieces and some sense of normalcy returns - or so you'd think. Insert more ominous music here.

You see that pesky bird flu is like Hedorah from GODZILLA VS. THE SMOG MONSTER. It's an ungodly organism constantly changing forms, mutating, and becoming increasingly contagious and resistant to conventional medicines. Scientist characters are constantly commenting on how the bird flu perpetually mutates to the point that I was hoping the film would conclude with it mutating into a physical form, preferably some sort of pathogen-spreading half-man/half-bird creature that Joely Richardson would have to wage mortal combat with. We could call it Manbirdpig.

No such luck. Instead, the film's downer ending has Dr. Varnack being summoned to Africa where word that the virus has mutated again into a strain of super bird flu - because a highly contagious bird flu that essentially melts your lungs just wasn't lethal enough for a movie like this - and begun wiping out entire villages with absolutely no survivors. This allows Joely Richardson to stand amid a Jonestown-esque scene and make an apocalyptic declaration delivered in such a defeatist manner you wonder if she too is about to whip out a pistol and blow her brains out. Again, no such luck. The film does conclude with a shot of birds flying through the air towards civilization with the rapidly accumulating death counter already past 24 million and climbing. The Discovery Channel debuted a movie this past April called SUPERVOLCANO about the cataclysmic effects of the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park erupting would have on North America and the world that did so without lowering itself to the level of scare tactics FATAL CONTACT: BIRD FLU IN AMERICA does, even having a more upbeat ending despite ending with what essentially amounted to being the new ice age. That's probably why I prefer this film over that one.

FATAL CONTACT: BIRD FLU IN AMERICA wants to be THE DAY AFTER of pandemic movies but is instead THE SWARM of pandemic movies. It's unintentional howler that grows increasingly ridiculous as it keeps amping up the sensationalism, all the while maintaining a straight face and trying to assure that this is an important film. Hey, if anything even close to what happens in this film happens for real then nobody is going to give a crap about the accuracy of a TV movie. But if bird flu goes the way of SARS, West Nile Virus, Mad Cow disease, Y2K, and other recent societal Armageddon’s that didn't pan out quite like the media played them up, FATAL CONTACT: BIRD FLU IN AMERICA is such a hammy work of outrageous exploitation designed to shamelessly prey on the public's fears that I guaran-damn-tee you it will go on to become a future camp classic.

If they laid it on any thicker I could smear it on my pancakes.