Quarantined

In an era of hackneyed TV movies full of has beens this rates at the very bottom. No dimmed star power, bad script and bad acting. There isn't even any camp value.

When Gary Collins is the most convincing actor, you're in trouble. At least this terrible movie afforded Mary. Ann Mobley a few months of lounging around the pool.

Undoubtably a pilot movie for a potential series as the main credits for the first five actors list both their real names and the character name whom they are portraying. The remaining featured players are introduced as "guest starring."

Competently made, but nothing about it stands out, either. Most likely greenlit by ABC to jump on the hospital bandwagon as CBS struck gold the previous year as their series Medical Center proved to be a huge success. Personally, I'm not much of a fan of television medical dramas as they really all seem indistinguishable to me. The only one I liked enough to watch 3 or 4 seasons of was "ER" and even that got tiresome eventually. Once you discard the new diseases or injuries that must be treated each week, what's left are interpersonal dramas and lovey-dovey affairs in the hospital which bore me to death (is there a pill to treat that, Doc?). Basically they're all soap operas with stethoscopes.

This TV movie is the pure product of what the late sixties and early seventies gave the audiences, where hospital movies have already begun to emerge: see for instance ERMERGENCY series starring Julie London and I forget many other films, TV movies or TV shows; and the early seventies where also the disaster movie genre began, with the famous AIRPORT series for the big screen. This TV film is nearly the very same scheme as AIRPORT, but taking place in a hospital rather aboard a plane. A feature where the story emphasizes on character's performances, colliding fates in a hospital, where surgeons, doctors, nurses and patients meet together whilst a cholera plague has to be fought. We watch here the character study and also the daily burden of the hospital crew to heal and manage the whole "ship" against the disaster plague.

A good movie made for TV by Sean Penn's father.