Contamination

Italy - Germany / 1980 Directed by Luigi Cozzi Starring Ian McCulloch Louise Marleau Siegfried Rausch Color / 95 Minutes / Not Rated Format: DVD (R0 - NTSC) Blue Underground

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Contamination, a poor man's Alien rip-off directed by Luigi Cozzi (helmer of those godawful Hercules movies starring Lou Ferrigno), gets the deluxe treatment on Blue Underground's new DVD. Quite frankly the film wasn't worth it. Aside from an effective score by Goblin and occasional moments of unintentional humor, this sci-fi gore flick is dull, dark and inept. There just ain't enough 'splodin' torsos!     In an opening recalling that of Lucio Fulci's Zombie, a cargo ship, the Caribbean Lady, is spotted steaming into New York harbor with no one at the helm. Radio messages go unanswered. Upon being boarded the vessel is towed to the docks where an investigation team comprised of health department officials and New York City policemen prepares to check it out. Led by NYPD detective Tony Aris (Marino Masé), the team searches the ship and finds the bloody corpses of its 'missing' crew, all horribly mangled. Even more puzzling is the nature of their wounds — the victims appear to have exploded from within rather than having been attacked. The cause of this calamity is revealed when the investigators stumble upon a large cache of green, basketball-sized eggs in the cargo hold. (But no green ham, Sam-I-Am.) One of the team picks up an egg found on the floor by a steam pipe, one that looks different from the others. It pulsates with a sickly yellow light and is moist and slimy while the other eggs are dry. Suddenly the egg explodes in the man's hands, spraying snot-like goo with the force of a shotgun blast. Within seconds the three team members within the burst radius begin to convulse in agony. As Tony looks on in horror the men's chests suddenly rupture with violent force, sending guts and gore flying everywhere! The cop is very lucky he was out of range. But soon he's locked up in a quarantine chamber by a super-secret "security division" of the U.S. government. Headed by the cold, no-nonsense Col. Stella Holmes (Louise Marleau), the organization has been tasked by the White House to find out what the deadly eggs are and where they came from. Once cleared as contaminate-free, Tony is asked by Holmes to join the investigation; he's the only person to have seen the eggs' deadly effect and live. In an amazing piece of deduction it's decided to check out the warehouse that was to receive the ship's cargo. (Well... duh!) Another huge cache of eggs is found there, along with three men who commit suicide — by popping an egg which in turn pops them — rather than surrender. The eggs at the warehouse are then burned with flamethrowers. But how many more are still out there? What is their point of origin? Holmes' scientific advisors have at least come to a definitive conclusion on the second question. The eggs are not of this Earth.     Then Stella has a brain fart. (Something the scriptwriters obviously never experienced.) She suddenly recalls that in the aftermath of a manned mission to Mars two years earlier, the British astronaut Hubbard claimed to have seen thousands of strange eggs in a cave at the Martian North Pole. He was branded a nutcase when a fellow expedition member reported seeing nothing of the sort. Even though she was a member of the post-mission review panel that got him kicked out of the space program, Holmes goes to see him and ask for his help. Hubbard (Ian McCulloch of Zombie and Zombie Holocaust fame) is living in anonymity, a bitter, broken-down drunk. He isn't very happy to see her. But after she shows him photos of the recently discovered eggs (and questions his manhood!) the blitzed Brit agrees to join her in tracking down their source and destroying them. Thus she assembles a crack investigative team consisting of herself, the boneheaded cop and the alcoholic astronaut to check out the South American coffee company that chartered the cargo ship. It's now a race against time... Can you manage to stay awake before the end credits roll?     Contamination is a really bad movie — and I'm not talking 'cool bad', either. The moody, sci-fi flavored score by Goblin (with some passages containing distinctly Pink Floyd-sounding bass licks) can't elevate the wretched scenes it accompanies. The script, rife with incredibly stupid and hackneyed dialog, is simply pathetic. Cozzi co-wrote this thing as well as directing so the lion's share of the blame is his. ("They were green, like in your photographs," Hubbard recalls of the Martian eggs after Stella shows him some stills... Black and white stills.) Cheap sets, poor acting and laughable special effects merely dig a deeper grave. The flick's main selling points, the gory chest-explosions, are severely undercut by showing them in super-slow motion. Even with the very dim lighting — which Cozzi admits was more to camouflage the film's cheapness than create atmosphere — they're pitifully phony. (During the final such scene one can clearly see a balloon strapped to the actor's stomach swell up before bursting.) A one-eyed Martian monster that appears in the film's climax (where d'ya think all those eggs came from?) might be passable on a Doctor Who episode from the early '70s but comes as a real disappointment here. Apparently most of the budget went for some quick location shooting in New York City and South America. This U.S. footage was for naught, however, as Cozzi makes the same error many European directors have... I don't care how many insert shots you've got of the New York skyline or city streets, you won't convince audiences it's not Europe when American soldiers — even those in secret security divisions — wear tan jumpsuits and French kepi-style headgear. And be sure to look for the U.S. Army general in the conference scene. Instead of the stars of a flag-rank officer on his shoulder, he sports both lieutenant's bars and a major's oak leaves. Inexcusably sloppy!

Blue Underground can't be accused of cutting corners on even 'lesser' film titles — its upcoming DVD edition of Contamination is first-rate. Along with nifty animated menu screens, the theatrical trailer and a photo/still gallery, there's a black and white "graphic novel", based on Cozzi's original storyboards, accessible to PC users with Adobe Acrobat. Two documentaries are also included: Alien Arrives on Earth (18 minutes), a recent interview of Cozzi intercut with film clips, and Luigi Cozzi On the Creation of Contamination (23 minutes), an interesting 'Making Of' piece shot at the time of production. In the first featurette Cozzi gives a brief overview of his career while extolling his lifelong love of science fiction cinema, particularly American classics of the '50s like Them!. In discussing Contamination he laments the changes forced upon him by the producers; he also shows himself to be less than gentlemanly by bluntly dissing star Louise Marleau for being "ugly". Cozzi originally wanted sexy British scream queen Caroline Munro for the part of Col. Holmes. While I can't disagree this would've made for a more watchable movie, his remarks are still pretty tacky. (Both documentaries are in Italian with English subs.)     As for A/V quality, this is the best Contamination has ever looked and sounded on home video. Surprisingly, four separate audio tracks are provided: Mono, Dolby 2.0, Dolby 5.1 EX, and DTS 6.1, the latter two mainly to give the Goblin score a bit of extra oomph. (Much of the dialog sounds hollow or flat, regardless of which track is used, due to the original dubbing process.) The anamorphic (1.78:1) transfer looks pretty damn good considering just how dark the original film is. Artifacting is minimal and blemishes practically nonexistent. 2/03/03

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