Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America

This TV movie is well worth watching especially if you are a disaster movie fan. The movie shows events from several points of view (a nurse, soldier, politician, a family and a pandemic expert) and builds on most of the characters quite well.

The acting is acceptable as is how the story flows, the ending is clearly left that way to allow for a follow-up TV series which obviously did not go ahead, so does have a feeling of wanting it to continue to conclusion but the movie does progress far enough to make this a stand alone story.

Certainly thought provoking and one of the more believable and credible potential disasters that could occur.

Most thought this movie was so far fetched when it came out in 2006. Then... 2020 happened and - reviews changed drastically. Not so far fetched anymore. We lived this nightmare.

What may be "fiction" now may be FACT in years to come. As bird flu in 2024 has now been contracted by humans, we'll see what the future holds...2025 is already off to a bad start.

We hope it's not a repeat of Covid with forced "immunizations" and wide-spread panic with rights being taken away. No one in 2006 thought this would EVER come true and yet it did.

Truth is stranger than fiction they say and if the past is anything to learn from, I hope we learned enough lessons in 2020.

Made-for-TV movies hold a dear place in my heart, for some reason I totally fail to grasp. There's just something I love about the inherent "B" quality that always seems to crop up in them. Not everybody sees it this way.

I gather from reading the other comments here that many of you tuned in hoping to see a movie. This is a common misconception about TV movies. You aren't really watching a movie, you're watching a two hour long episode in a TV series you will never see the rest of.

Actually, the last TV movie I saw about a pandemic disease was the multi-part adaptation of Stephen King's "The Stand," which came out embarrassingly well done. There was none of that here, but what, really, were you expecting? I have no idea how accurate the disease information in this movie is; I don't really care. The fact is that I've seen a fair amount of TV movies by ABC and CBS (none from NBC, though I hear there's one out this week) and I'd have to say that ABC makes a consistently better movie than CBS does.

CBS likes to make disaster movies. I saw BOTH "Category 6" and "Category 7" on CBS, and I'm glad to say that "Fatal Contact," though cheesy, is "Citizen Kane" compared to either of these. The characters here are fairly believable, the special effects were not overplayed (TV movies always have terrible special effects, and even their regular effects aren't that hot), and I even liked the ending. I felt it was satisfactory.

All told, TV movies are never that good. The case for most of them is that if they turned up in theaters, you would walk out and demand your money back. But with direct-to-TV productions everything's a little bit more freewheeling. Relax, and immerse yourselves in the the heavy-handed plots and shallow budgets of network feature films...

Look through the reviews. Those from 2006-2018 are in the 3-5 range. Those from 2021 (like this one) see it differently. We've all seen the cheesy post-apocolypse or post nuclear war movies or killer bee movies. What they all have in common is that there is no reality to compare them to--so they could be accurate predictions or just pure bunk.

I'm sure those who saw this in 2006+ thought "Pure bunk. That would never happen!" I just watched it in spite of its 4.7 IMDB rating, as I was curious. Wow! OK, the movie is pure made-for-TV B-movie fare, but what were the writers thinking? Worst case scenario? Or did they have gifted insight? The almost unbelievable accuracy of the predictions is enough reason to watch this.

Well, I saw this on Prime in 2022 and decided to give it a view. I found it pretty similar to our pandemic, yet funny to read the prior reviews to 2020 as nobody has seen something like we have, post 2019. The cast isn't well known, but I did like the Blonde from nip tuck so I gave it a try.

In all honesty the rating should be a little higher, this idea may have been a little far fetched but it hit home since, in a lot of ways. I probably wouldn't have watched it though if it was made after 2020. As nobody cares to be reminded of the pandemic constantly, while still in it. This being 2006 is different. It also would have been worse if Facebook and social media were stronger when they filmed this. They weren't too far off.