by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Over the past two nights
I’ve been attending both the Mars movie nights (http://marsmovieguide.com/) and the
Vintage Sci-Fi screenings (http://sdvsf.org/) in
Golden Hill and, in addition to one pretty decent movie (Five Million Years
to Earth) which I reviewed in a
previous moviemagg blog post, I saw three of the God-awfullest films I’ve ever
seen in my life — and the proprietor is promising two equally awful movies at a
special screening this afternoon, Star Crash and Galaxina (which sounds like the Ford Motor Company decided to market a muscle
car to women). The Friday night Mars movie screening included Five Million
Years to Earth (a film I think is a bit
overrated — at least until the final reel it’s Hammer Studios being
unexpectedly Val Lewtonesque in keeping the menace off screen and suggesting
its presence with sound effects and things like plates falling off shelves and
walls shaking, but at the end they bring out a visible monster that looks like
a piece of cotton candy floating in space — and it suffers from the
self-imposed challenge for writer Nigel Kneale of making an interesting movie
when virtually all of it takes place in confined spaces, either an office or a
hole in the ground) and a 1980 Italian-German co-production called Contamination, whose producer, co-writer and director, billed as
“Lewis Coates” but really Luigi Cozzi, frankly intended the movie to be seen as
an unaIuthorized sequel to the 1979 film Alien and even originally called it Alien Arrives on
Earth.
This one begins in New
York City, with the twin towers of the World Trade Center (you remember)
vividly visible in the background, with the arrival of a derelict ship called
the Caribbean Lady. The ship steams into New
York harbor with no visible living crew members on board, and its only cargo is
boxes of something called “Café UniverX” which is supposed to be coffee (the script makes
a big deal about the “X” not only being capitalized but in a different font
from the rest of the name). Only four guys in haz-mat suits (which at least
meant the people who prepared the English-language edition could dub them
easily without worrying about synchronizing lip movements, a task that eluded
them when the film featured dialogue by people whose faces were visible) go into the ship’s hold and find its
captain and three other crew members afflicted by a strange, hitherto unknown
disease that literally blows up its victims’ organs from inside, Cozzi a.k.a.
“Coates” having decided that if the famous scene in Alien in which the alien bursts out of the victim’s
chest scared the living daylights out of millions of moviegoers around the
world, he could go Ridley Scott one better and have a human’s entire guts blow
up inside him and splatter blood and gore across the screen. Alas, even the
first time this shot is too disgusting and gross to be genuinely scary, and it
pales by repetition.
The authorities eventually find out the reason this is
happening is that those mysterious boxes contain, not coffee, but giant green
pulsating things that look like enormous avocados (a comparison actually made
in the dialogue) and, when they get warm, explode and release a silicon-based
bacterium that causes humans to spill their guts — literally — and then croak.
Three of the haz-mat guys die of the bacterium when one of the “eggs” (the term
used for them through most of the movie even though one of the pickier
scientist characters protests that it’s inaccurate) rolls under a radiator,
which explodes it and starts the disease. The one who survives is a New York
City police detective named Tony Aris (Marino Masé), and he teams up with the
leader of the homeland security (or whatever they called it in 1980) team, Col.
Stella Holmes (Louise Marleau, who actually turns in the film’s most
interesting performance), to investigate the mysterious deaths and find out
what’s up with that derelict ship and that oddball cargo. Col. Holmes
ultimately traces it to a previous expedition in which two astronauts, Ian
Hubbard (Ian McCulloch) and Hamilton (Siegfried Rauch), went to Mars — only
Hubbard came back a drunken wreck and Hamilton disappeared and was presumed
dead when his private plane crashed six months after he returned. Holmes and
Aris find Hubbard and sober him up enough to accompany them on a trip to
Colombia, where the “coffee” shipments originated, and they trace the UniverX plantation and find,
predictably, it’s been turned into a giant operation to pack more eggs and send
them out all over the world to annihilate the human population so the
silicon-based beings who plotted all this out can take over Earth.
What’s more,
it turns out that Hamilton and his girlfriend and co-conspirator Perla de la
Cruz (Gisela Hahn) are running the operation, and just when you begin to wonder
why a human like Hamilton would be administering an operation that will render
the human race extinct, his vocal register changes and it’s revealed he’s
really one of the aliens who’s taken Hamilton’s form in order to lead the operation.
Eventually the good guys are able to destroy the eggs either by freezing them
or burning them up with a flame-thrower (a major plot hole; if the eggs are
hatched by heating them, isn’t applying a flame thrower to them the last thing you’d want to do?), until at the very end it
seems like earth is saved — until one of those horrible open-ended non-endings
intervenes and we see, in sight of the World Trade Center, an egg on the
streets of New York City exploding and spewing forth its bacteria. (This made
me wonder why Luigi Cozzi didn’t return to this material after 9/11 and concoct
a sequel in which the World Trade Center towers are brought down by alien
bacteria and the aliens only fake it to look like a terror attack.) Contamination might have been a better movie if “Coates” and
co-writer Erich Tomek hadn’t inserted all the gory scenes, if they hadn’t put
in all the sexual (and sexist) by-play between Hubbard and Aris as to who would
get to go to bed with Col. Holmes (neither, as it turned out — good for her! —
though it was a bit disappointing to see Aris get eaten by one of the monsters
in the closing scenes since I was hoping he would pair up with Holmes and Hubbard would fall
back into his gutter), and if the whole thing hadn’t been beset by a typical
bad-movie air of tackiness. It’s the sort of film that it’s hard to put your
finger on just what went
wrong, but nothing really goes right either.
