Contamination Blu-ray Review

Police make a quick sweep of an unmanned cargo ship that has arrived in the New York Harbor, only to find the mutilated corpses of the crew that appear to have exploded from the inside out. As the search continues, they discover the freight is a mass of boxes filled with weird green pulsating football- sized eggs. One such egg spurts fluid onto a few members of the team and they all suddenly explode in a bloody, pulpy mess. Police Lt. Tony Aris survives the ordeal and is taken into observation where he is introduced to Col. Stella Holmes. She informs him that this is now a military operation and uses his information to study one egg, while ordering the rest destroyed. Her research leads her back to the findings of a recent mission to Mars, in which an astronaut named Hubbard claimed to have seen countless giant deadly eggs. His fellow crew member, a man named Hamilton, denied all knowledge of any such eggs and Hubbard was dismissed as psychologically damaged. Holmes tracks down the disgraced astronaut and apologizes for doubting his testimony. She teams with Hubbard and Aris, and the trio are on the next flight to Colombia in search of the cargo ship’s origins. What they find is far more outrageous than they could either fear or imagine.

Contamination (1980) is a wild ride that starts off as an unassuming mystery before repeatedly switching gears as it approaches its far-out conclusion. A police investigation that leads to a government cover-up with ties to the space program is enough of a plot for your average run-of-the-mill thriller, but what follows here resembles an earthbound hybrid of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) mixed with a silly dose of the James Bond franchise. This strange Italian film used to frequent late-night cable television under various pseudonyms including Alien Contamination and Toxic Spawn. The director, Lewis Coates, is actually an alias for Luigi Cozzi (Starcrash) and he apparently has gone on the record confessing he is more interested in entertaining audiences than maintaining logic or coherence in his movies.

British genre fave Ian McCulloch (Zombie) stars as Cmdr. Ian Hubbard, a broken-down shadow of a once-great man beaten down by government conspiracies. He shines in the role of reluctant hero and receives a solid character arc as he is forced to step up to the plate one final time to save the world. The stakes are high, but McCulloch is a strong enough actor to make Hubbard believable. Louise Marleau (Satan’s Sabbath) is Col. Stella Holmes, a woman determined to right an injustice she helped set in motion years ago as she discovers the truth of the weird egg mystery. Marino Masé (The Godfather Part III) is NYPD Lt. Tony Aris, a man that starts off as our hero cop, but is quickly reduced to third-wheel comic relief status once the party lands in Colombia. The trio of talent share great chemistry, a real accomplishment given that due to the nature of low-budget Italian cinema of the 1980s, all of the performances in the film (with the exception of McCulloch) are dubbed by other actors.

Contamination is a really dumb movie that tries too hard to follow a linear plotline but is determined to include all of the really weird shit that gets thrown in along the way. Of all the strange things present in this picture, the threat of “contamination” is not one. I somehow found this bizarre mash-up of material particularly entertaining, as it has been many years since I last watched the movie. I’ve never really been a die-hard Cozzi fan, but maybe I was just in the right mood or something because I had a lot of fun this time. One thing fans of ‘80s Italian horror can count on is an incredible score by the legendary progressive rock group Goblin, and the band doesn’t disappoint. Their music carries viewers across the lesser moments of the film and really delivers when the red stuff flows across the screen. If you have never heard of this flick and are looking for a totally bonkers way to entertain your friends, I encourage you to check out this movie immediately.