ALIEN CONTAMINATION (1980)

DIRECTED & WRITTEN by Luigi Cozzi (as Lewis Coates).

STARRING  - Ian McCulloch as Commander Ian Hubbard,  Louise Marleau as Colonel Stella Holmes,  Marino Mase as Luitenant Tony Aris NYPD,  Siegfried Rauch as Hamilton,  Gisela Hahn as Perla de la Cruz.

PLOT  - An abandoned cargo ship drifts into New York Harbour and a forensics team are sent to investigate. Once onboard, the team finds a bunch of mysterious looking green eggs and the mutilated corpses of the ship's crew. When one of the eggs bursts open and the green slime it contains lands on one of the forensics men, he becomes infected and literally explodes.

Colonel Stella Holmes is assigned to investigate, she finds that the eggs are linked to a recent doomed space mission to Mars. One astronaut, Hamilton, disappeared and the other, Hubbard, became an alcoholic recluse. Hubbard is persuaded to help in Stella's investigation, along with an NYPD cop, Tony Aris.

Eventually, the three uncover a plot to import the deadly alien eggs around the world, tracking the shipments to thier source, they find that Hamilton is still alive and is under the influence of a cyclopean alien intelligence, an alien intelligence that seeks to wipe out the entire population of Earth with it's deadly alien contamination...

DIALOUGE  - "Help ! Let me out ! There's an EGG !!!"

PERFORMANCES  - The acting in this movie is hampered by many things. The first is by the terrible dubbing that some actors are subjected too. This being an Italian film, all of the multinational cast of actors are speaking in thier own languages on set and the voices are later dubbed into the language of whichever country the film is exported to. Only Italian filmmakers seem to do this and I have no idea why, its just a bizzare quirk of thier brand of cinema. This, of course, leaves it very difficult to judge the merits of an actor's performance, as you're only seeing effectively half of the performance in the first place.

Another thing which drags this movie down is the creative decision to have the first fifteen minutes of the film being populated by characters all wearing hazmat suits and gasmasks. Its truly ridiculous. You don't know any of these characters, you can't tell who is who because all thier faces are covered by breathing apparatus and you have real trouble telling what they're saying due to the masks obscuring ther faces. Literally EVERY actor's dialogue in those first fifteen minutes comes out as"muffle, grunt, muffle, grwwgrwnt". It completely takes you out of the film before its even begun, and whilst it may be realistic there's a reason why movies take a measure of artistic license to tell thier stories. Because if a film where to be one hundred percent realistic then it would make for an extremely boring viewing experience, as this is.

Factor in the long scenes of dull pseudo scientific jargon dialogue that plagues the first half of the film and the poor old actors are on a hiding to nothing trying to sell this film to the audience.

Probably the best performance is Ian McCulloch as Commander Ian Hubbard. McCulloch, a British actor and veteran of many an Italian schlockfest, can obviously tell he's appearing in utter shite, so he just hams it up massively. He's at least fun to watch, unlike his co-stars.

Louise Marleau, can also obviously tell that she's appearing in utter shite, but rather than take McCulloch's stance and just roll with it, she instead just phones in her performance. She just looks really bored throughout the entire film. I cant really blame her to be fair, as her character is as dull as dishwater. All she's given to do is spout reams and reams of the aforementioned pseudo scientific bullshit dialogue. It must have been about as interesting as having to act out the contents of the local phone directory, she has my deepest sympathy.

Marino Mase as Tony Aris is, I think, supposed to be the comedic relief, totally hampered by the fact that he's not remotely funny. The characters of Aris and Hubbard seem to have a friendly rivalry over who's going to get off with Stella first. Maybe they've both got some kind of bizzare sexual fetish for really boring women...

Siegfried Rauch as Hamilton appears to be very Bond villainesque, but once again his best efforts are hampered by far too many scenes of clunky expositional dialogue. He has the potential to be a good villain but sadly that potential is never reached and he becomes just another unfocused and bog standard character.

SFX - The special effects are probably the best thing about this shitfest. The alien cyclops is a decent enough creature design, although he is a little bit static looking...

There's just not enough movement to him. It speaks volumes about the movie when even the fake alien prop manages to look as bored as everybody else. At least its consistent I suppose...

The alien eggs look like Rugby balls covered in bubble wrap and slime, which is what I suspect them to actually be...

SEX & VIOLENCE  - The moments of gore are by far the best reason to watch this film, they liven up something which is otherwise throughly dull. 

You get some pretty messed up looking corpses for starters...

I mean, it's just an overabundance of fake stage blood, but at least its something.

The full on bodily explosions are pretty memorable...

I wasn't able to find any GIFS to show it here in its full glory, but all the bodily eruptions take place in slow motion. So you can see every bit of splatter flying off in every conceivable direction. The gore so upset the BBFC that Alien Contamination was one of the films that ended up on the infamous video nasties list and was banned in the UK for many years.

RATING - As you can tell, I struggled with this movie. On paper it's a sound enough concept and it does have it's good points (McCulloch and the gore), but it's all so lifeless and dull that any brief moments of enjoyment are just drained away by the surrounding fatty tissue that makes up the rest of the movie.

Literally the film goes like this - fifteen minutes of characters in masks that you don't care about spouting jargon (that you can't even hear properly)...ten seconds of gore...fifteen or so minutes of dull people in labcoats spouting jargon...ten seconds of gore...fifteen minutes of Louise Marleau being boring...two minutes of Ian McCulloch being hammy...ten seconds of gore...etc...etc...etc,  until you either fall asleep or go insane.

I wanted to like this film (I always want to like every film I watch), I really did, but unfortunately, in this instance the bad, the dull and the tedious just far outweighs those all too brief moments of joy, so I'm going to have to give this 2 exploding B-movie actors out of 5.

One redeeming feature that this film does possess is that it did have some great V.H.S. and poster art back in the day. These little gems are the best legacy that this film can possibly offer and are far, far better than it actually deserves.

Lettuce entertain you ???