“What else do you want to know about me? How many times a week I screw?"
"If you're always in that condition, it's obvious you couldn't get it up, even if you used a crane."
The chest-bursting scene from Alien is a perfect sequence, one that’s remembered for its horrific goriness. It’s the grossest, most visceral moment in an otherwise understated movie that relies on suspense. However, the visceral stuff is what many Alien imitators took and ran with; in fact, Contamination seems to have been hatched at a meeting where everyone involved dreamt of a way to outdo the Ridley Scott's famous scene. The problem is that they didn’t do much else--hell, they even seem to care how they could squeeze an actual alien into most of the film. Instead, all they needed were the eggs, some goo, some exploding bodies, and maybe half a plot to bring it all together.
Contamination actually recalls another movie at first: Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, as a derelict ship drifts into a New York harbor. A crew is dispatched to check it out, and all they find are eviscerated bodies, shipments of coffee, and some mysterious green eggs that explode into a green slime that spatters all over some of the members, reducing them to a pile of bloody viscera. Only tough New York City cop Tony Aris (Marino Mase) survives and lives to tell the tale to Colonel Stella Holmes (Louise Marleau), a Department of Defense liaison who surmises that the eggs might be connected to a mission to Mars from a few years earlier.
Luigi Cozzi (fresh off of delivering Star Wars cash-in Starcrash) reveals the point of Contamination pretty early, and, if you judge it on the sheer amount of viscera it splatters around, sure, they successfully one-upped the chest-bursting scene from Alien. The prosthetic bodies here literally explode like human piñatas into a puddle of blood and guts, and it’s a spectacularly trashy take on Alien’s more clinically precise approach. The opening scene is actually quite great, anchored by both the great effects and a moody Goblin score that sets an eerie tone. It might even be on par with the opening sequence in Zombie--it’s that good, which is why the remaining 75 minutes of Contamination are quite a disappointment. Frankly, it mostly sucks after this point, especially as a horror movie. Instead, the film attempts to ape Zombie again by having its characters jet off to an exotic locale, only it’s played like some kind of spy movie.
In this case, it’s South America, where there’s supposed to be some insidious and mysterious plot being cooked up. However, the script gives up the ghost completely by revealing exactly what’s going on--a character that was thought to be dead isn’t, or at least doesn’t appear to be, and the eggs are basically like WMDs that will be used to wipe out humanity so Martians can invade. Because the invaders operate on telepathy, there’s at least one guy who is inexplicably immune--Ian McCulloch, who plays one of the astronauts on the ill-fated Mars mission. Because all of this is revealed about midway through, Contamination is deathly paced, with the only suspense coming during a scene where McCulloch and Mase debate whether or not they should barge in on Marleau’s room because it has a “do not disturb” sign placed on it. They don’t know that this is part of an assassination attempt and that someone’s stuck one of the eggs in her bathroom and locked her in, so there’s an interminable sequence where she stares and screams in horror. All the while, you just want to see the bad boy explode because that’s all Contamination has to offer.
If it had any sort of an interesting story, it might work; sure, it’s fraught with the same inane, tone-deaf dialogue and character interactions (check out the scene where Marleau goads McCulloch into slapping her around), but Cozzi can create cool scenes that exist in a vacuum. The flashback to the Mars mission is this low budget, white-noise nightmare with McCulloch and a fellow astronaut examining a cave, and it’s kind of eerie. Likewise, the final scene finally has some other neat animatronic effects work since an actual alien shows up and compels a character to walk right into its maw (sadly, it’s not as gory as it should be). Plus, there are some more exploding bodies along the way, and the Goblin score is okay, albeit not among their most memorable. Marleau’s performance is also rather fun, as she’s a sufficiently icy bitch that frequently clashes with Mase’s laid back, dumb Brooklyn cop.
It’s a shame Cozzi couldn’t stick them into a better movie. Contamination isn’t exactly as hazardous as its title might suggest, but it’s certainly a dreadful bore for much of its runtime. The life just gets sucked right out of it when it switches over to being more of a conspiratorial thriller instead of a straight-up horror flick like Alien 2: On Earth. I’d like to think that combining both Italian Alien rip-offs might have resulted in a truly great movie. But alas, we’re left with what we have, but Blue Underground at least treated Contamination pretty well on DVD. Released nearly a decade ago, it’s still a pretty decent release; the transfer is a little soft and flat, but this could very well be due to Cozzi’s photography; on the other hand, there’s three soundtracks, including a 6.1 DTS track that renders everything loud and clear, plus it adds a little oomph the Goblin score. Extra features include a couple of features with Cozzi, a trailer, a poster and stills gallery, and a graphic novel that can be accessed via DVD-ROM. There have been a few unauthorized releases under the title Alien Contamination, but avoid those; instead, track this one down via your favorite rental service. Rent it!
