Not too much new in this story of some contaminated shrimp giving lots of people cholera and giving everybody the heebeejeebies. The problem is real enough. There are plenty of reasons to be worried, even about old-fashioned nineteenth-century epidemic diseases like cholera. Cases do crop up once in a while. About thirty years ago a couple of teen-aged boys got it from fishing a watermelon out of the Hudson River and eating it. On top of that, a lot of pathogens are starting to flip the bird at antibiotics, developing resistance to them, and then passing that resistance on by natural selection. It doesn't help that we're pumping our beef full of antibiotics to make a few extra dollars.
Huh? The movie? Oh, right. Lindsay Wagner is an epidemiologist with some fictional federal health organization (read "CDC"). She's having a bit of trouble with her new family at home. Her husband is a widower with two kids and they resent her taking Mom's place. Hubby isn't too happy with her either because she spends so much time at work.
Anyway, people on an airliner nibble the befouled shrimp and start to get sick. As they deplane they split up and begin melting into the larger population, bringing the disease with them. The passengers must be a bunch of filthy pigs because the only way you spread cholera is by not using toilet tissue properly and not washing your hands before leaving the bathroom. This is especially bad news when, like one of the many victims in the story, you happen to be the salad chef in the kind of fancy restaurant at which guests must observe dress codes, and you get sick and feel faint, and to stop yourself from falling to the floor you plunge your contaminated fist into a giant bowl of tossed salad that's about to be parceled out to patrons in the dining room. Compared to that, finding a finger in your chili is small potatoes.
I honestly don't like to think too hard about this film because it reflects so badly on the writers and the director and it seems unkind. But -- well, the plot is all over the place. I couldn't follow exactly who was getting sick or how. And too much time is wasted on Lindsay Wagner's family, the nice, hunky husband and the two confused kids. They go on a weekend camping trip during which Dad comes down with cholera. He's physically disabled and mentally disordered on a remote mountaintop and the two kids don't know what to do. The older boy begins to hike back to civilization. That's sensible enough. But then he has to fall down and twist his leg so he must hobble back to the camp site. Disaster upon disaster. And when the rescue helicopter is flying about, looking for them, towards the end, they do the same thing that leaves me feeling that maybe I'm coming down with cholera too. They scream excitedly at the noisily rattling helicopter which is half a mile away at a position angle of 45 degrees -- "Help! We're down here! Help!" Have the writers no shame? Does the debilitated husband survive? Do the two kids bond with their stepmother? In the immortal words of Marcellus, you'd have to get medieval on me before I revealed the answers. I will tell you how the spreading epidemic is contained though. At the end, a minor character walks onto the screen out of the blue and informs Lindsay Wagner that all the airplane passengers have been tracked down and so has everyone who's had contact with them. A nice surprise there. Skips all that tedious business about how they managed to identify and track down thousands of strangers.
There are a couple of redeeming features in the film though. Lindsay Wagner is professionally competent, better at being cool than at being distraught. Elizabeth Pena, however, is absolutely GREAT. Her face has large features and shiny black irises that look as if they could see through steel. Her voice is low and her movement fluid and languorous. She's startling, and all of this without being staggeringly beautiful. Molly Parker in a small part is equally good, pale and vulnerable, and with tilted Mongol eyes. A couple of the bit parts are played very well too, though I can't remember the names of the characters or even if they had any.
Overall it's about what you'd expect from one of these Canadian made-for-TV dramas. The chief problem is that we completely lose sight of the organism and its shenanigans after a three-second glimpse of it on a slide. If you want to see a far more technical film about a subject like this, see "The Andromeda Strain." Equally good: "And the Band Played On." If you want to see a fully realized treatment, watch "Panic in the Streets."
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