Contamination
THE world of Italian exploitation cinema in the 1970s and 80s was famous for its cheap and cheerful copies of big, successful American movies but as shameless Hollywood rip-offs go, Contamination is in a league of its own.
On its slimy surface this 1980 curio from director Luigi Cozzi is a straightforward Alien cash-in. From its emphasis on evil extra-terrestrial eggs and randomly exploding human chests, it certainly ticks all those boxes.
Far from merely aping Ridley Scott’s famous deep-space shocker, though, this is a low-budget masterpiece that brazenly thieves from just about every alien invasion movie that went before it. That means half-baked nods to everything from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers to Quatermass with a gore-heavy injection of Zombie Flesh Eaters nastiness thrown in too.
Add to that a wildly incoherent plot, some seriously gammy acting, god-awful dubbing, gratuitous and graphic real-time special effects and a synth-heavy score from masters of the art Goblin and the ingredients for a proper cult classic are all in place.
Freshly reissued on a sparkling, extras-packed Blu-ray disc by the ever reliable cult vultures at Arrow Video, Contamination still both baffles and thrills. What was once dismissed as just another gory European video nasty can now be seen as a significant, if flawed, genre film deserving of fresh critical appraisal.
Beginning with a ship floating aimlessly into a harbour in New York, it opens like a classic 70s zombie flick. When a group of scientists and police investigate they find everyone on board is dead with nothing left but a bloody mess and a pile of weird, gelatine-covered oversized eggs. When you get too close to these alien eggs they spit out a nasty goo that makes your body explode internally. Later more eggs are uncovered in a Bronx warehouse guarded by workers whose bodies have been taken over by alien forces.
Cop Tony Aris (Marino Mase) and military scientist Colonel Stella Holmes (Louise Marleau) are on the case and quickly track down a drunken ex-astronaut Ian Hubbard (Ian McCulloch) who came back from Mars several years previously with wild stories of deadly alien eggs.
He returned without his fellow astronaut (Siegfried Rauch) and his tall tales were understandably dismissed as delusional nonsense. Before long, however, this unlikely trio of investigators have uncovered full-blown plans for world domination and when a mad 50s-style master alien appears all attempts to maintain sanity are tossed to the wind.
Like many an Italian exploitation epic, this starts brilliantly, spreading guts and gore as it goes. It drags depressingly in the middle as nobody seems to know what's going on and then tries desperately to sew it all together at the end.
In many ways it's a shambles but it's hugely entertaining. The actors all spew out the ridiculous lines with admirably straight faces, that Goblin score blatters away boldly in the background and the endless gore practically seeps from the screen. Outlandish and fragmented though it may be, Contamination remains genuinely infectious fun.
