Product Details

• Actors: Joely Richardson, Scott Cohen, Justina Machado, Ann Cusack, David Ramsey
• Directors: Richard Pearce
• Writers: Ron McGee
• Producers: Dennis A. Brown, Diana Kerew, Judith Verno, Paul Carran
• Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish
• Region: Region 1 encoding (US and Canada only)
  PLEASE NOTE: Some Region 1 DVDs may contain Regional Coding Enhancement (RCE). Some, but not all, of our international customers have had problems playing these enhanced discs on what are called "region-free" DVD players. For more information on RCE, click here.
• Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
• DVD Release Date: October 31, 2006
• Run Time: 83 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000HRMAMM
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #138,273 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

An American businessman in China becomes the first victim of an avian flu strain that can be passed from human to human.
Genre: Television
Rating: NR
Release Date: 30-JAN-2007
Media Type: DVD

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars DOESN'T QUITE FLY, November 11, 2006

By 

Michael Butts (Berkeley Springs, WV USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America (DVD)

This made for TV flick certainly makes an impact on just how devastating a pandemic of the dreaded bird flu could impact the world. That's the film's main problem--it is so heavy handed and somber that it doesn't really flesh out the storylines to make us care for the people. It's almost like a documentary; nothing really "happens."
Joely Richardson is lovely but her performance is lifeless; Scott Cohen fares a little better as the obsessed governor of Virginia; and Stacy Keach is appropriately bureaucratic. Ann Cusack takes acting honors, however, as the widow of the businessman responsible for bringing the virus into America. She evokes a lot of sympathy as a wife and mother who takes charge when things get really bad.
A dark, disturbing if ultimately uneventful movie, though.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars "These Are Dark Times Indeed.", April 21, 2010

By 

Robert I. Hedges - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America (DVD)

"Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America" is a deliberate attempt to sensationalize a current events story, combine it with fearmongering and horrible overacting, and present it on television as the disaster of the week just in time for the May sweeps. The film begins plausibly enough with a single businessman bringing the H5N1 virus back from China and it spreading across the country at lightning speed with special thanks to air travel as a vector. Despite the actual experience of avian flu in North America, the film features extensive quarantines imposed, total social breakdown, all insurance companies going bankrupt, rednecks hijacking a military vaccine convoy, starvation, and the like. Certainly widespread flu is nothing to take lightly, but this movie features over-the-top hysteria that is totally unjustified, and features horrible over-emoting throughout, although it still has time for a demographically-driven romantic subplot and dance on a rooftop amidst the death, mass unmarked graves, and charges of racism against an unlikable and obstreperous governor.

The only big-name actor in the cast is Stacy Keach, who turns in by far the best performance of the film, although I can't imagine why he ever signed on to this project. The film is remarkably downbeat, and I do give the filmmakers credit for staying true to their dream of making an utterly bleak film. Obviously the flu virus mutates over time, but this strain mutates very quickly and with grossly increasing lethality. When we finally get to the end of the film a team of US experts discover a new mutation that has killed all the villagers in regions of Angola, no doubt paving the way for extinction of the human race. One of several problems I have with the film is how these experts in Angola talk among themselves: one actually has to lecture the others that their flu shots may not protect them due to mutations in the H5N1 virus. You would think that if these were the best and brightest virologists and epidemiologists on the planet that they would grasp basic information known to high schoolers taking a biology class. Likewise I have issues with the constantly reinforced concept that everyone (well, everyone except one child, anyway) dies from the flu. Even in the most severe outbreaks that has never occurred. Not to say that it couldn't, but that the level of panic that this movie wants us to attain is historically completely unjustified.

The biggest problem for me wasn't that I didn't think the movie was scientifically credible (I think influenza pandemics can be very severe, although I have reservations about the scope of this presentation; it's unlikely though not statistically impossible.) My biggest problem with the movie is that it's ponderous, preachy, and poorly acted. With the exception of Stacy Keach, there really isn't much to redeem this movie, although I do give it two stars for attempting to tackle the difficult subject of a cataclysmic medical event.

As an aside, I watched this and the wholly unrelated and grossly inferior "Flu Birds" as a double feature. While I found "Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America" to be boring and plodding, it is exponentially better than the horror that is "Flu Birds." While this movie attempts to treat a serious subject somberly, "Flu Birds" is simply an excuse for a excrementally bad horror movie about killer birds. I recommend this double feature only to the truly cinematically hardened.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I thought that this movie was better than average, July 4, 2007

By 

Brian Burt "The Opinionator" (Realityland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America (DVD)

It is true that it showed almost like a documentary; and I liked that about this movie. Many disaster movies focus on several troubled relationship and the main theme of the disaster is only a back drop; not so with this film. After watching this movie, I actually felt that I knew more about avion flu and how various government agencies MIGHT deal with the problems that develop.