I know what you’re thinking: “What in holy hell — a movie about the avian flu?” You bet your sweet ass. And so is every bit as deliciously awful and willfully ripped-from-the-headlines as its title makes it sound, is it Atomic Train-level awful? Well… yes, and not quite, respectively.

In its review at the time of its original broadcast, The Hollywood Reporter noted that, “Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America is so disturbingly timely it
adds to its impact, but even without any contextual backdrop, it’s an
exceptionally well-produced (by exec producers Diana Kerew and Judith Verno and
producer Dennis A. Brown), -written (by Ron McGee) and -directed (by Richard
Pearce) cautionary tale that’s more than worthy of its sweeps scheduling.” I’ll
be honest, that strikes me as a very awkwardly constructed sentence, and
slightly irritating given the pay rate for such a piece. The litany of factual credits notwithstanding, that sentence does briefly touch on something else that’s correct — the movie is well designed to hit all its sweeps-market beats, and in robust fashion.

Fatal Contact, which originally aired on ABC in May of
this year, tells the story of the rapid spread of the HN51 virus (aka bird flu)
after one man is infected during a trip to Hong Kong. As
the virus spreads, the stakes become more deadly when it mutates into a strain
than can be passed from human to human. Dr. Iris Varnack (Nip/Tuck‘s Joely Richardson)
begins the quest to keep the virus contained while the grim and dour Secretary of Health and
Human Services (Stacey Keach, of Prison Break) works the levers of national power, and a New York Health Department nurse (Six Feet Under‘s Justina Machado) dedicated to her job and her soldier husband who supports her wage the fight on the
front lines.

The aforementioned McGee’s script naturally embraces the
worse-case scenario if the bird flu were to be transmitted to humans in America (the governor of Virginia mistakenly call for urban quarantine, resulting in riots and looting), but any sort of devotion to realism gives way fairly quickly to demands for ridiculous action and suspense set-ups that are dubiously or tangentially related to the chief conceit. Director Pearce (No Mercy) stages a few nicely executed scenes of shoestring mayhem and hysteria, but otherwise the movie’s set-ups are almost always massively contrived in some way or another, and so the air-quote drama feels hopelessly compartmentalized. Richardson has a face I could stare at for a good two hours before getting bored, so that helps matters, but the rest of the cast — which includes Ann
Cusack (Grey’s Anatomy), David Ramsey (All of Us) and Scott Cohen — is mostly B-grade, and the simple fact of the matter is that Fatal Contact isn’t as deliciously bad (and therefore ripe for fun) as its premise and title might suggest. It’s actually just kind of shrug-inducing.

Presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, Fatal Contact comes packaged in a regular, plastic Amray case, with no supplemental features save a couple trailers for The Da Vinci Code and other titles. C- (Movie) D- (Disc)