266. Alien Contamination

266. Alien Contamination aka Contamination (1980)
Director: Luigi Cozzi
Writers: Luiji Cozzi and Erich Tomek from a story by Luigi Cozzi
From: Cult Cinema

Strange green eggs that spray a corrosive acid are found on a ghost ship in New York harbor. It’s up to a scientist, a disgraced astronaut, and a New York City cop to discover the truth and prevent a potential alien invasion.

Hello Italy! Thanks for the dubbing and establishing shots of NYC that we’ll never see again. 1980? Hey movie, thanks for reminding me of what the World Trade Center used to look like.

So a ghost ship docks in New York harbor and Lt. Tony is sent to investigate. He and a team of scientists start finding the bodies of the crew, each of them seemingly having exploded from within. Down in the cargo hold, they find loads of strange green eggs, one of which is glowing. Of course, they all gather over this glowing, pulsating, green curiosity that proceeds to explode. All the scientists get hit with the material, swell up, and explode. Lt. Tony is taken into quarantine.

There he meets Col. Stella Holmes, the new head of this case. They learn that the eggs were to be delivered to an import/export outfit in the city. When they raid it, they find three thugs and thousands of eggs. The thugs shoot one of the eggs, spraying themselves and dying.

In the lab, the scientists explain that the eggs seems to be silicon-based (that means alien!) and that when they get sufficiently hot, they eject this deadly substance. She injects a rat with the substance which then explodes. I’ll admit, that moment was hilariously bad, but it also stands out as being one of the few moments of the movie with any vim.

By this point, I’m thinking this is an Italian Aliens rip-off, but there are no creatures in the eggs. Just lots of eggs all over the place. The team suspects the plan is to hide them throughout the sewers so the entirety of New York could be contaminated. What the endgoal of that plan is, I cannot tell you.

Turns out this is the future, though (which I should have recognized from the cardboard backgrounds doubling as “computer tech”) and there’s been a manned mission to Mars. One of the astronauts, Cmdr. Hubbard, came back saying he’d seen a giant alien an a cave full of eggs. His partner, Hamilton, denied the story. Hubbard was discharged and, six months before the events of the film, Hamilton died in a plane crash.

So, Holmes picks up Hubbard and, with Tony, goes down to Brazil where the ship originated from. There, Hamilton who had faked his death, is working with the alien from Mars to try to contaminate the Earth with the eggs. Various action sequences, Holmes and Tony are captured, Hubbard arrives to save the day.

Not before Tony gets eaten by the alien, though. This was also a lovely moment.

Hubbard shoots the alien to get revenge for it having ruined his career and life and Hamilton, no longer under the alien’s psychic control, explodes in slo-motion, which was a mistake because it lets you clearly see the seams in the giant squib on his chest as well as the tubes running up his pant legs to power it. Holmes and Hubbard leave together and then we cut to an egg sitting in the garbage in some city. The egg explodes and we freeze for, THE END

Not a terrible flick—straightforward, okay Saturday-afternoon movie effects, and a plot that’s a little more ambitious that I expected—but there’s just no energy to it. I’d even say it’s weirdly low-key. The movie isn’t trying to be low-key, it’s just that everything happens in a very perfunctory way. The actors don’t bring any oomph to their parts and the whole thing kind of plods along.

The biggest example of this is the, I think, intended love triangle of Holmes, Hubbard, and Tony. Tony keeps, I think, flirting with Holmes, but she has a seeming history with Hubbard, not the least part her being the head of the committee that said his story was bunk. I have to throw that “I think” in there, though, because not only do the characters not seem invested in flirting with each other, they don’t seem that worked up over alien eggs invading Earth.

Give Gramma a kiss!

The alien itself looks good in a goofy way. The monster looks silly, like a one-eyed version of Mother Brain from Captain N: The Game Master, but they built a full-sized version that grabs one of the actors and then eats him. The crew on this movie built a big silly monster, but they put the effort in and built it well.

There were a few moments that stood out because they showed a bit more inventiveness than the rest of the movie: the exploding rat, Tony getting eaten, and the alien itself. However, they were too few to carry the rest of the movie along at its shuffling pace. The people involved in making it didn’t seem that invested so it was really hard for me to get invested. It’s not bad, per se, but it’s not great. I was hoping for something over-the-top and cheesy when I started this, but it never lived up to those expectations.

We Hate Movies would classify this as a “hangover film”: you can have it on in the background, not pay particular attention to it, and not miss anything. That’s not a recommend, but it’s not a suggestion that this be avoided either.