Contamination (1980) – Review

I know this is a subject that this site has already broached many times before and will no doubt do so many more times in the future, the ruthlessness of Italian filmmakers in the 70s and 80s will never fail to amuse me. Whenever Hollywood would produce a genre rocking film that could be easily (and cheaply) reproduced, nothing, not common sense, not artistic integrity, not copyright laws to stop them piling onto the bandwagon until the wheels literally fell off. However, to describe the as Alien-esque parasites who feed off the creative juices of the likes of Ridley Scott, James Cameron and George A. Romero may be a bit unfair when there’s movies like Luigi Cozzi’s Contamination about.
Essentially a movie based entirely around the chestburster scene in Alien, but without the budget to actually set the thing in space, Contamination instead wedges its Giger-inspired, intestinal issues in an absolutely bonkers conspiracy thriller that throws in dated sexual politics, awful dubbing and Ian McCulloch as an alcoholic astronaut.

When a large ship drifts into a New York without a single soul on deck, the powers that be prove that they obviously haven’t seen Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters by pulling on some hazmat suits lever over of George A. Romero’s The Crazies and go for a big fat search. What they find is the mangled bodies of the crew and a large stash of green, football-sized eggs that are being smuggled in boxes marked with Colombian coffee beans; but the real story is that when these eggs reach a certain temperature, they burst and spray everyone in the vicinity with their goopy innards. Speaking of innards, contact with the vicous goop has a particularly violent reaction with human biology and before you can yell “Guts-a-poppin’!”, two of the three investigators find that their stomachs have exploded out with the force of a shotgun blast.
Obviously a major health crisis is alerted and while the survivor – dopey New York cop Tony Aris – is getting scrubbed down, the frosty Colonal Stella Holmes springs into action to lockdown this exploding stomach shit before it becomes a global epidemic. Figuring out that the eggs are linked to a mission to Mars that occured two years ago (we went to Mars in 1978?), Stella recruits washed up, boozy astronaut, Commander Ian Hubbard, who originally tried to warn us about slimy explode-o-eggs way back then.
As the three start to unravel a conspiracy that sees mind-controlled slaves trying to ship the eggs from Colombia to populated areas, they find that the apparent mastermind is Hamilton, the other guy from that Mars mission – but why would he suddenly turn against his own kind and try to launch an extinction level event that’ll leave a hell of a mess? Is there someone behind him? Like, a big, one-eyed, egg laying alien maybe…?

I think it’s fairly obvious from the synopsis above added the eagerness of the movie to blow out people’s stomachs like ghoulish pinatas, that Contamination is hardly a masterpiece – and yet Cozzi’s gutbusting extravaganza turns out to be one of those films that still proves to be a hugely entertaining watch thanks to all the dogier aspects of its outlandish plot. However, taking centre stage are those hilariously gruesome digestive discharges and in true, Italian style, Cozzi stages them in operatic slo-mo as insides become outsides as the victims scream extravagantly despite their lungs taking flight in a shower of gore. It’s obviously the main selling point as it tries to ride on Alien’s gore-soaked coat tails, but ironically, the scenes also got the movie in trouble with UK censors during the original Video Nasties scare in the 80s.
While its temporary banning thankfully saved countless lives from any copycat, stomach exploding behaviour (bask in my sarcasm), it’s fantastically spectacular to watch even if it’s visibly fake as arseholes thanks to the victims looking like their wearing a backpack on their front under their clothes before detonation – but it oddly never gets boring.
What does get boring is all the human stuff which truly leads me to believe that no one on the production bothered to do any research on how the government deals with global health scares. The hazmat suits barely look like they could keep out a gentle breeze, let alone an alien pathogen and God knows what the production department was smoking when they came up with a military medical HQ that looks like a cheap Star Trek set – but it’s this and Manny other amusingly questionable filmmaking decisions that ultimately make Contamination such a goofy blast.

While it’s rather progressive to make the Colonal female, the movie takes hilarious measures to undermine any empowerment whatsoever by having McCulloch and Marino Masé’s cop constantly trying to one-up each other by trying to melt her “frigidness” by trying to bed her while she seems to be the only one who gives a flying fuck about alien eggs. This, however, is only the tip of the eggs-berg (sorry) as the movie accidently gets funnier the longer it goes on. Take the fact that Masé seems to look distractingly like Kramer from Seinfeld when he starts wearing Hawaiian shirts after reaching Colombia, or the fact that McCulloch’s character manages to burn off two years of drunken bitterness instantly by slapping Louise Marleau Colonal full across the face which she hardly seems to notice – and let’s not even mention the face that the eggs moan like they’re experiencing a very bland orgasm.
However, the film ultimately hits 7.5 on the ludicrous scale when the mastermind is revealed to be a giant, mushroom looking cyclops from beyond the stars who apparently wants to play Blofeld from James Bond and bust the bellies of the entire planet for… reasons, I guess. Featuring burly tentacles with skull crunching mouths on the end and a glowing eyeball which makes puny earthlings powerless to resist its thrall, it’s a perfectly silly cherry on a very stupid cake.
But while Contamination is utterly devoid of scares (an overlong sequence that sees Stella locked in an oddly inpenetrable bathroom with a groaning egg while the two males argue outside her hotel about whether they should eat without here is laughably tension free) or smarts, there’s something incredibly watchable about a film this weird. And to give the devil his due, Cozzi’s ovum opus is far more original than most other Italian rip-offs end up being, even if it ditches its Alien-like aspirations in favour of something more like an international thriller.

Get some like-minded mates round, crack open some brewskis and prepare to bust a gut, just not quite in the way the filmmakers intended.
Green eggs & BLAM!

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