“Listen, Aris, if I have to die with the rest of the world then I want to have a proper dress on and clean underwear.”
Justin’s rating: The real Cyclops of the mutated X-Men!
Justin’s review: Fresh off blatantly copying Star Wars with his messy Starcrash in the late ’70s, director Luigi Cozzi decided to steal from another recent scifi hit — Alien. And thus, Contamination joined the swelling ranks of cheap and strange knockoffs from Ridley Scott’s scifi horror masterpiece.
A group of New York City cops are called to check out a ghost ship sailing into the harbor. The vessel is completely devoid of people but full of smelly alien eggs. Here we pause to acknowledge that the director must’ve fixated on those iconic egg sacs and bursting chests to make a whole movie out of the concept. Except that Contamination’s eggs don’t spawn facehuggers — they moan for a while* as a kind of countdown timer and then explode in green goo, causing any humans nearby to also explode from the inside-out.
It turns out that there’s a conspiracy afoot to plant the big ol’ avacado eggs all across the planet, hopefully to eradicate all of humanity piecemeal in the least-efficient genocide ever. This effort is tied to a recent trip to Mars, where the eggs were retrieved and one of the astronauts came under the influence of aliens.
To figure out Ground Zero for the moaning egg invasion, an arrogant military scientist, a flippant NYC cop, and a crazed disgraced astronaut go globe-trotting to South America (cue Indiana Jones travel music) to find the headquarters of the cyclopean alien behind it all.
Despite transplanting some of the Alien concept to a more budget-friendly earth setting, Contamination does a fine job crafting a pretty entertaining B-movie. Italian rock band Goblin (who scored Suspiria and the European version of Dawn of the Dead) provides an amazing score while eggs and people and squibs are bursting left and right while the heroes snipe at each other and trigger a whole lot of collateral damage. That previous sentence was messy because that’s the kind of flow this movie offers.
It’s far from perfect, to be frank. There are a few too many time-eating scenes where people talk (in awkward dubbing) and the plot is more of a drawn-out police procedural than anything else. The main alien animatronic at the end barely worked, which held it back from being as powerful of a reveal as it could’ve been.
Still, from the perspective of someone who’s seen a few too many Alien clones, I liked this one. It’s well-made and knows what it wants to do, even if what it’s doing is objectively silly and bloody.
*Maybe they realize what kind of movie they’re in and are going, “Ohhh nooooooo”
Intermission!
- Contamination was partially funded by Columbian drug traffickers who asked the crew to carry product back to the USA
- I’m still weirded out when I see the Twin Towers in movies like this
- Music by “The Goblin”
- Alien eggs have a good time moaning for some reason
- A lot of exploded people on a ship? Eh, go ahead and lift up an alien egg. I’m sure that’s. not going to backfire on you.
- “Don’t call me baby, young man!” “Don’t call me young man, babe!”
- Dang that mouse exploded big-time
- I see we’re borrowing the flamethrowers vs. eggs from Alien as well
- “It’s obvious you can’t get it up, even with a crane.” Ouch.
- Mars has a very polar ice cap with a cave boasting sharp teeth (and filled with olives, which stand in for the eggs)
- “I don’t have the gift of bringing corpses back to life.”
- She doesn’t seem to mind being slapped
- “What a waste of a good-looking woman?”