"What do you want to know Colonel? How many times I screw?"

"It's obvious that in this condition, you couldn't get it up with a crane."

CONTAMINATION (1980)

Directed by Luigi Cozzi

Ahhhh, how I adore Italian horror films that steal concepts and ideas from Hollywood. They do it with such pride! Such reckless abandon! They do it with no shame! Case in point, this gory bad boy! Luigi Cozzi's fucking super cool ALIEN rip-off! It's such a trip! A real product of its time! With the success of the previous year's ALIEN, our Italian EXPLOITATION MASTERS decided Ridley Scott’s masterpiece and box office success was ripe for a rip-off. Since they weren't working with anywhere near the budget of ALIEN, they made the story earthbound. An abandoned ship floats into NY harbor. (Hey! They're ripping themselves off doing a ZOMBIE riff again!) When the scientists and cops get on board to investigate, they find members of the crew who look like they blowed up real good! From the inside out, no less! Nice, gory, disemblowed corpses are discovered everywhere! Also discovered is a cache of glowing round puss engorged green "eggs" that light up and pulsate. When one of them explodes, the green goo goes flying, lands on a bunch of guys, and causes them to explode...in slow motion! NICE! The make-up fx are quintessential Italian GORE certified! I just kept saying, "Yes!! This is so cool!" Like in ALIEN, people explode from the inside out, only no creature comes out, just entrails! The scientists and army, led by Colonel Stella Homes (Louise Marleau), go on a mission to find out just what the fuck is going on! They find a warehouse full of the pods. They get into a gun fight, but when the guys looking after the pods lose, they commit suicide by shooting the pods, getting oozed, and then exploding in a wet spew of guts. What a way to go! They soon figure out these things are from Mars, so they track down an astronaut who had gone to Mars, Commandeer Ian Hubbard (the great Ian McColloch, from ZOMBIE). He's now a drunk because when he spoke of these pods, he was chastised, belittled and told he was a liar. We DO get to go to Mars in a flashback, but to save money, they first show the two astronauts walking in white fog because they, "landed on the polar ice cap." Riiiiiiight! They also go inside a cave filled with the eggs that, for a miniature, looked pretty damn good. The story kinda plods on showing humans under hypnotic alien mind control, growing the pods on a coffee farm!!!! (Shades of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS here.) Suffice to say it's not about logic, its about gory fun! And it delivers! Oh, and you're gonna love the monster alien cyclops creature! He's a combo of the floating brains from THE BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS and the alien from IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE! The thing kills this guy then sucks him into one of its many gory fleshy oozing mouths! The cyclops is fucking awesome! With its wacky dubbing, insane convoluted plot, totally demented dialogue, lack of anything resembling logic, dark progressive rock soundtrack by Goblin, neato throbbing egg sound fx, and Italian splatter galore, this is as entertaining a gory 80's romp as you could ever wish for! What a time in cinema this was! A time when direct rip offs that were sold to the unwashed masses as being, in some bizarre way, REAL sequels (who ever believed this shit?) were digested and swallowed whole. Who cared? It was a fun night at the movies or drive-in. Arrow Video does their usual superb job, providing a pristine 2K restoration and mondo extras. The commentary track by horror historian, author and director Chris Alexander is a hoot! Chris doesn't come across as some stuffy "expert"...he has fun watching it with us and provides lots of info and lots of laughs! Why? Cause he loves this crazy shit as much as we do! There's also a great documentary on the blu-ray called: IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE ITALIAN CASH-IN, featuring my splat pack brother Chris Poggiali and Maitland McDonagh, author of the great Argento book BROKEN MIRRORS, BROKEN MINDS. They hep you to the Italian rip-off jive! MIght as well call a spade a spade! Rip-off or not, this film is wonderful! Italian horror rules!