The plot: Based on Michael Crichton’s first techno-thriller, it concerns a satellite that crashes in a tiny New Mexico town. Of course, the locals open it up, and minutes later everyone’s buzzard feed.
The team assembled to fight includes the calm, logical scientist; the young, handsome doctor angry at “the system:” the curmudgeon who’s too old for this, and the sarcastic, disillusioned but brilliant researcher with a dangerous secret. These all are cliches, of course — but they weren’t cliches in 1971. In fact, it almost plays like a documentary.
Scary part: Directed by Robert Wise (yes, the same guy who made “The Sound of Music”), the entire movie thrums with dread and spiky, twitchy fear, in part thanks to the use of Gil Mille’s eerie electronic score. The discovery of the bug remains one of the great unnerving moments of sci-fi — you’re terrified not so much by the green Jell-O (the props were cliches, too), but what it does. The worst moment might be a test on the effect of the germ on a lab monkey. The viewer had no doubt that they’d just seen a creature die. Right there. On the screen, with pitiless clinical observation. No germ movie has ever felt as real as that moment.
(P.S. The monkey didn’t really die.)
“OUTBREAK” (1995)
The bug: It’s called Motaba, but it’s your basic Ebola.
The plot: “Viral hemorrhagic fever” was all the rage in the mid-’90s, thanks to a book called “The Hot Zone,” an account of Ebola that terrified readers in 1994. In this fictional version, some idiot smuggles an African monkey into America, producing an outbreak in a picturesque town whose population is drawn from L.L. Bean catalogs. Dr. Dustin Hoffman has to work with his ex-wife, Dr. Rene Russo, to stop evil Gen. Donald Sutherland from using the germ as a weapon.