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This Luigi Cozzi sci-fi horror movie gained some infamy here in the UK for being one of the films which made the infamous video nasty list, i.e. Films released on home video in the early 80's which were regarded as criminally obscene by the British authorities. Like many others from this list, it's hard to work out exactly how this one made such a notorious list, as while it is gory in places, it's quite far from being ultra-shocking stuff. It would probably be fair to say that this one takes some influence from Alien (1979) with its focus on scary throbbing eggs which explode, it also shows the influence of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) with the idea of alien mind control. A boat drifts into New York harbour with all its crew dead and mutilated. It soon becomes apparent that this was caused by the aforementioned strange eggs. Before long it becomes apparent that they are related to a recent Martian expedition in which one astronaut made odd claims about a cave full of eggs. The authorities get in touch with this now alcoholic ex-astronaut and a small team head to South America in search of the origin of the shipment of deadly eggs.

You wouldn't describe this as a stellar example of Italian horror but, for me, it is a perfectly entertaining one. The story-line, while influenced by other films, is distinctive enough to stand on its own, while the gory effects were executed well enough and kept things interesting. There was some attempt at generating tension with a suspenseful scene in a bathroom where a woman is trapped in the small room with a pulsating egg. While the final scenes with the cyclops were good enough too. Aside from its video nasty status, the film is perhaps best known nowadays for featuring a score from soundtrack legends Goblin. Its maybe not up to the standard of the work they did for Dario Argento but it is still very good nevertheless and adds some class to proceedings. It's hardly an actors film but it was good to see regular of Italian exploitation movies Ian McCulloch (Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979)) appear as the bitter astronaut. Overall, you could do worse than check out this bit of sci-fi/ horror hokum.

This film has good ideas, some good gory visuals; however, it is extremely slow after a fast start that it makes the film less enjoyable than it should have been. This film is obviously trying to capitalize on Alien, but does so in a very roundabout way. We do not get an Alien on the attack in a spaceship; no, instead we get an alien life form on earth, one that we will not see until the very end! Instead, it is all conspiracies and lunch plans as the film stops focusing on the action after the first 15 minutes as it seemingly tries to lull you to sleep after it begins with a bang!

The story has a ship that is essentially a runaway as the crew is nowhere to be seen. A group of people explore the ship and find the crew has been killed in most gruesome fashion and a bit confusing fashion as we learn that they were killed by alien eggs exploding and spreading goo over its victims. However, how did goo get on the captain hiding in a closet or to anyone not near the eggs? Soon a cop and a scientist track down the place where the cargo was to go and find more eggs and then they track down an astronaut who has seen this things on Mars and then they make dinner plans and we get to watch a woman beat on a bathroom door for five minutes leaving one to question why a bathroom door would lock from the outside as an egg takes forever to explode! Soon they must battle the people responsible, but not really the alien because the poor thing is stationary...

This film has promise and could have been good with more exploding effects and action. After the factory the film becomes almost a chore to watch, even when the alien is revealed as we have to watch people slowly walk through the jungle and stumble towards the alien! The alien actually looks pretty gruesome though, so kudos to the visual effects department as they did a good job on both it and the exploding bodies. The people responsible for the plot, not a very good job at all.

So, you get a somewhat entertaining film to watch if only it did not get so slow. I watched this thing again after watching as a kid so long ago and I was like 'awesome' after the first bit, but then it becomes a chore to watch as my eyelids got heavy watching the padding in this thing. Italians can make some entertaining films that are basically ripped off American films, but they seem to have a harder time with alien films as Alien 2: Alien on Earth also has the problem of being slow, but at least it picks up in the end. This one, not so much, though it was fun watching the alien eat a guy!

Being a child of the fifties, I grew up watching drek like this. The only difference I could see between this movie and something made in the fifties was the color.

I'm not sure who Luigi Cozzi is, but I am sure that he must be related to Ed Wood.

This movie was made in 1980, long after the special effects of "Plan 9 from Outer Space" should have been deep-sixed. The plot is very thin, the dialogue is embarrassing and the ending is both bad and predictable.

Having said all that, I had a great time watching it - it was on the El Rey channel which has become one of my guilty pleasure favorites. It's 90 minutes I will never get back but that's OK.

Well this was another movie that tried to pass itself off as Alien 2 long with Ciro Ippolito's Alien 2 - On Earth. The problem with doing this is that one immediately draws a comparison with Alien which had a much bigger budget and therefore is always going to look a lot better.

Luigi Cozzi's stab at Alien isn't too bad, although he himself has stated that his is a better movie than Ippolito's film although I don't agree - sure the effects are slightly better, but there is only one effect in the entire movie - the chest exploding (or popping) that is repeated about a billion times in super-slow-motion. Alien 2 - On Earth was much more fun.

Anyway the narrative begins as an exact copy of Zombie Flesh Eaters with the appearance of an abandoned boat floating into New York Harbour. Even the dialogue is copied from that film - "The skipper of that boat must be a real turkey!". Not only do the Italians rip-off Hollywood movies, they rip each other off as well.

Predictably the police who investigate the boat stumble across the dead crew, who fall out of cupboards and look as if they have been ripped open from the inside! They then discover some strange egg like shapes, "Maybe they're avocados!" enthuses one policeman. However when they try to pick one up it explodes, showering the police in sticky goo. The goo leads to immediate imflammation of the belly and "pop!" they're guts fly out all over the place. Not a bad effect although if you look closely at one of the victims, he has suddenly become a foot wider (to make room for all those animal entrails).

The police captain escapes and helps Commander Stella Holmes (Louise Marleau) in the hunt to discover the origin of the eggs.

They visit Hubbard (Ian McCulloch), who was part of an expedition to Mars some years previous who was declared crazy after talking about seeing thousands of eggs there. Now living in alcoholic squalor he moans at Lt. Holmes before telling his story. Cue flashback of the expedition to a Martian cave and a terrible attempt at recreating the exact scene in Alien. The acting in this bit is truly atrocious as McCulloch delivers his lines "I looked at Hamilton - and he was, his eyes, he was beginning to....Hamilton.....HAMILTON!" Followed by a Daa Daaa DAAAAAAAA on the soundtrack. Truly the funniest part of the movie using that same useless Goblin soundtrack that for some reason everyone raves about - why? It's terrible!

Well it's not great and nowhere near as fun as "Alien 2 - On Earth" but it's better than the average trash movie. Starts well and finishes okay but it sags very badly in the middle which does make you want to nod off.

Ian McCulloch shines, as he did in 'Zombie Flesh-eaters', this time as an alcoholic former NASA astronaut who is dismissed as mad when he talks of the threat of an alien invasion from Mars (as is par for the course in these space capers).

If you enjoy lame acting, poorly dubbed voices, cheesy 80's gore effects and an implausible plot, then this is the film for you.

I first heard of this film from a friend of mine. He owns a very old copy of this movie that was not called "Contamination" but called "Alien Contamination". So, he let me borrow this flick one night and I was rather disappointed at first. The gore and exploding stomaches were heavily cut out and the story really isn't worth watching without it. I finally got a copy of this film that is fully uncut and it is much better. Of course the story line is quite simple. A ship is found with some extremely mangled bodies on board and some eggs that look similar to the eggs from the movie "Alien" only much smaller and when picked up they explode causing anyone around to basically explode from the inside. So you can only imagine where the story line is going from here. Great gore effects, "Zombi 2's" Ian McColluch and a good score by "The Goblins" make this a descent Italian horror flick. I enjoyed it and I think most fans of the genre will. And by the way, other than the exploding eggs, this movie is in no way like "Alien". Many people call this movie another "Alien" ripoff, but this movie is not anything like it.

This film is a really silly movie. It's NOT an Alien rip-off, the only thing common to Contamination and the Alien franchise are alien eggs. Any other comparison fails completely. The movie is badly acted, badly scripted, badly directed, even the sound is not in sync with the actor lips (of which some may be speaking Italian) and nothing makes any sense. But it's partially entertaining just the same. If you don't try to take an 80's horror movie seriously, you always end up admiring the effort.

Bottom line: a film that is more entertaining than it should be, I rate it 3 because it's so bad it is worth watching. The best scene: the cave mouth on Mars. Hilarious!

Luigi Cozzi's "Contamination" is a typical Italian "Alien" clone.The film itself is not bad,because it offers some cheap thrills with plenty of nasty gore.Ian McCulloch("Zombi 2","Zombi Holocaust")is quite memorable as a former astronaut,who returned from Mars.Like many Italian exploitation films made in the early 80's,the film begins on location in New York City.A bunch of mysterious eggs is discovered along with some mutilated bodies on a deserted ship.Getting too close to these eggs could be very deadly,because they spew some goo at you and make your body explode."Contamination" is a fun little film loaded with enough gore and violence to satisfy fans of Italian splatter.It's sometimes too talky and dull,but the beginning is great as is the ending.So if you're a fan of Italian low-budget exploitation give this one a look.Grab some beer and get ready for some thrills,chills and blood spills!

Pretty much a ship with green eggs (that resemble giant avocados) bound for Dr. Seuss is found in "New York" harbour. Insanity follows at a confusing pace. It has exposition up till the very end. Terrible dubbing. It is just a mess.

There is only one moment of blood and it's brief. There's no sex. No drug use. No grotesque scenes. Why was this a Video Nasty? It is tame even by Hammer film standards. My guess is this was the only movie truly deserving of being banned due to good taste.

It is a terrible movie. The direction is gutter worthy. The director was even an unapologetic jerk about the actress on this which went a bit too far with outright public bullying calling her old and ugly. I don't like naming and shaming and that cancel culture mess, he just went a bit to far into the realm of potential civil lawsuits.

Beyond all that... The story is garbage. Even up to the end there is exposition. It is an utterly shameful movie and a deliberate copy of a Ridley Scott movie that came out a bit before this mess.

This is a marginally watchable movie. It is so bad that it is funny. I can't recommend it for its gripping story or quality directing. It has neither.

Italian/German sci-fi horror about large green Martian eggs initially found on a cargo ship drifting apparently unmanned into New York. An unlikely team of three head to a coffee manufacturer in Colombia where they eventually encounter a big alien cyclops. Back in the 1980's Contamination found itself banned as a Video Nasty in Britain, and has been released in cuts of varying length. Thankfully it is now available uncut and it looks great on Blu-ray. The plot is silly, the dialogue is hilariously bad, the Martian cave looks very cheap and the dubbing is often out of sync (not unusual to be fair), but on the other hand there is a lot of gore on show, the pace is good and the movie boasts a Goblin musical score. I love the movie, yes it is trashy but for me it is very entertainingly so. I don't think that I could tire of watching it.

Little did cinema realize when it happened just how much Sergio Leone's first two entries of 'The Man With No Name' trilogy, in making spaghetti-western versions of Akira Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' and 'Sanjuro', would be an influence, today, 50-odd years later. It could be said that in the fervor of Italian directors going from one filmmaking trend to the next (from the neorealist agenda of 'Ossessione' and 'Rome, Open City', to swords-and-sandals epics, then spaghetti westerns, then the crime films of the 70's, then space invasion films, such as this, after the huge global success of Sir Ridley Scott's 'Alien' and George Lucas' 'Star Wars') has had almost as much an influence on cinema as the groundbreaking game-changers that initiated this mass-production. It taught virtually all filmmakers that with a fraction of the huge Hollywood budget, a couple of ideas could be extrapolated into a much cheaper film that could ride on the coattails of success of its way-more-famous predecessor.

Being nostalgic, there were some things that really scored big for me and made me raise my rating: Seeing the Twin Towers of New York City again, the Goblin soundtrack and the Cannon Pictures logo, especially. It's a suspenseful, well-made for its expense sci-fi film that isn't simply worth a watch, but is worth owning a copy and re-watching as well. This is most definitely one of my finer finds from my ominous Mill Creek 50-pack, 'Nightmare Worlds'.

This moderately amusing "Alien" cash-in, taking place on Earth, is ultimately too plodding for its own good, too short on action and too heavy on dialogue. Some genre fans may grow tired of the exposition, and regret the fact that there's just not enough good creature stuff. There IS a creature at the end, but it's largely of the endearingly silly variety. There is some delicious gross out material here, namely lots of chests exploding in slow motion. And of course there's always the spectacle of eternally cool Ian McCulloch turning into bad ass hero once again. But there just isn't a lot here to really recommend this one - that is, of course, unless you're a hopeless addict of the science-fiction and horror genres.

A massive ship mysteriously cruises into New York Harbour (this opening is highly reminiscent of "Zombi 2", which also featured McCulloch), and authorities discover that its cargo hold is full of disgusting green egg-like objects. Upon further investigation, they find that there's also a warehouse in NYC housing the things. Soon, a government agent, Colonel Stella Holmes (Louise Marleau), an NYC police detective, Tony Aris (Marino Mase), and a traumatized former astronaut, Ian Hubbard (Mr. McCulloch) travel to South America to investigate the ships' origins.

"Contamination" does have some entertainment to offer die hards, but overall one would be advised to simply revisit "Alien". (I've been told that another Italian knock off from this period, "Alien 2: On Earth", is more fun than "Contamination".) One misses that deep space atmosphere a good deal. That said, it's still a hoot to check out these effects and these performances. Also starring are Siegfried Rauch as the astronaut Hamilton, Gisela Hahn as his associate Perla de la Cruz, Carlo De Mejo as Agent Young, and Carlo Monni as the ill-fated Dr. Turner. One point of interest is a typically nice score by the great prog rockers Goblin.

Watchable enough but never really inspired.

Five out of 10.

Contamination is my idea of movie heaven. It is a shining example of the dubbed sci-fi/horror, Euro-trash spectaculars that were produced on a massive scale in the 70s and early 1980s before Europe turned its backs on cheap entertainment and focused on making dreary art-house fare. In my opinion, Contamination is a reminder of all that was great about this, now virtually extinct, film-making phenomenon.

Contamination is generally regarded as the embarrassing bastard child of Ridley Scott's "Alien". While the film does shamelessly steal certain elements from Scott's masterpiece, it is by no means a boring copy. The plot is so twisted and demented, not to mention ludicrous and ridiculous, that it transcends its "borrowed" elements and becomes something almost entirely unique and wonderful. For example, whereas Alien takes place on a deserted spacecraft, Contamination begins on a deserted boat, then moves to New York City, makes a detour via Mars and ends up in a Colombian coffee factory!

In addition to the utterly preposterous storyline, the joys of Contamination are manifold. There is the wonderful 80s synth score, some of the most atrocious acting committed to film, side-splitting dialogue, fantastically ancient cutting-edge technology (the science lab is a marvel of 70s/80s set design), fabulous euro-effects (among them glowing, musical alien eggs, exploding rats and better yet, exploding people) and then there is the Cyclops.

I could probably write a novel just on the glorious Cyclops. What a wonder of latex and wire! The film is worth viewing just for this magnificent creature, with its big, glowing eye and vile snout. This kind of craptastic special effect died a painful death with the introduction of CGI, and movies have been all the worse for it.

Forget the pretentious rubbish clogging up IMDb's top 250 and watch this stunning opus instead. I can not recommend this highly enough.

An Italian Science fiction horror movie using ideas from 'Alien' which was released the previous year. This is bad, though strangely watchable. The Acting is horrendous and the plot is absurd, but the movie is saved by the amazing special effects, which are truly terrible. If you love bad movies, give this a go. I watched it on Amazon Prime.

I'll have to admit, I have a lot of fun with this one every time I watch it, which by now has to be four or five, since it often seems the perfect Saturday afternoon entertainment. It's often criticized as lazy, cheap, uneventful, and leaden-paced, but the charm of low rent Italian shlock has a tendency to take hold of me when I let my guard down, and this movie delivers exactly what you'd expect from an Italian sci-fi movie from 1981 called "Contamination," and does so in spades. There is Atrocious dubbing and absurd dialogue, messy gore, a lot of guys in white containment suits and gas masks running around, a bubbly synth soundtrack, green goo, and several dubious plot points (example: why do only three people go to investigate something that may be a threat to the entire planet?).

The accusation that this is a cheap steal of "Alien" doesn't hold up well either, since the imagery of an exploding chest is all that's retained from Ridley Scott's movie, and even the way that's handled has nothing to do with hostile alien larvae. The concept here is all Cozzi's - and admittedly it's not the greatest concept, as the villainous Alien at the center of the mystery, a heaving cyclopean blob of tentacles, has no apparent motive in wanting to destroy all human life other than that it is "evil" and "superior" (what does it want to populate the earth with - itself?), and our characters in peril have to repeatedly act as if their primary foes - glowing green alien eggs that pulse and explode but actually are not capable of movement - are absolutely terrifying. I applaud Cozzi for going in a direction other than "small cast of characters trapped in claustrophobic setting with hungry beastie," but it's obvious that a little more attention to detail was needed in the editing room. I imagine this was a rushed production.

Nevertheless, we are left with funny and entertaining cheese that I heartily recommend. Cozzi never addresses the shortcomings previously mentioned, concentrating on the action and intrigue, so we're left with a flick that moves along fairly speedily and doesn't get boring, even if it doesn't always make sense. There are some crude but memorable gore and creature effects and I didn't think the cast was too bad, all things considered. It's always good to see Ian McCulloch, and this time he is an embittered drunk who was excommunicated by the scientific community after reporting alien life on Mars. He's actually playing a more developed character here than he did in "Zombie," and for the brief scenes that he has to play the action hero he doesn't do too badly. All in all this an under-appreciated gem that knows how to entertain and does so shamelessly.

It seemed like some producers saw Alien a few times and walked away thinking the best part was the chestburster scene, so they decided to make a film filled with chestburster sequences and that's how we got Contamination. Like most Italian horror films from this time, the gore is admirable, it's reasonably well shot, the dubbing is godawful, and nothing makes a whole lot of sense. Unfortunately, Contamination also happens to be painfully boring with long stretches of not much happening.

It's already a risk in a horror film to have long sequences of dialogue and exposition, but when it's performed this horribly (and dubbed poorly), it's a death sentence for a movie. All we have to look forward to are the effects which, after the first 20 minutes or so, don't show back up until an hour into the film, which gives us too much time to mull over how little the movie makes sense.

What could have been daffy fun turns into a slog with only a decent Goblin score to keep the audience awake.

All I came here to say is this; the shots of the alien eggs in the cave are what I'm willing to bet my life on, in fact, green olives! I knew this was an Italian made movie, but Mama Mia, thats some ingenuity right there.

Side note: this movie is fun as hell, has a soundtrack done by Goblin, which is almost a gaunrantee of a good time and has some really great practical FX. Gorey as hell in some parts, very talky in others, not quite an all out Fulci blood and guts affair but not quite an early talky exposition-laden brittish sci-fi. Contamination sides somewhere in the middle of that.

So in summation, the alien eggs are OLIVES, I am convinced and will spend the rest of my life trying my hardest to confirm that.

HA! So bad its almost good! I watched a grainy trailer many years ago in the golden days of VHS, which suggested a movie with a menacing and surreal atmosphere. I never managed to get a hold of a copy until now. The movie I imagined in my head was better than this though. Yes, this movie probably deserved winning in the category "Best exploding torso in a dramatic context" in the GOREZONE magazine. Inbetween these rather cool sequences there are sometimes painfully slow exposition and dialogue which varies between dull and hilarious. Some cool sound effects though, and nice Goblin score. I recommend that you see it at least once, preferably with some beer and friends.

Luigi Cozzi is one of the great historians of italian cinema. The stories he tells! But a great director, he is not. However, considering the budgets and constraints he had the outcomes are not all terrible. Or at least are terrible in an entertaining fashion.

Contamination is a James Bond/Alien rip-off that is also reminiscent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. See, this is what I love about italian exploitation. They go above and beyond with their influences, and sometimes stumble upon something that actually feels quite original. This is not a bottom-of-the-barrel production either: aside from the soundtrack cues which are outtakes from the Goblin soundtrack of Dawn of the Dead, there's no stock material or other cheap-assery.

The cast is decent, the gory special effects are gross and hilarious at the same time and the camera tends to linger on the carnage, so it's a treat for the practical effect enthusiast. Other than that, it's your average dumb fun that has nothing to offer as far as suspenseful moments, intriguing plot twists or satisfying endings go.

A cargo ship drifts into New York harbor carrying alien eggs that explode and cause everything they spray with their egg juice to explode also. There's a lot of exploding. A dumb New York cop (Marino Masé) and a bitchy Colonel (Louise Marleau) team up with a former astronaut (Ian McCulloch) and head to Colombia, where they find a coffee plantation full of alien eggs. Oh, and there's a big ugly alien cyclops.

Italian sci-fi horror film written and directed by Luigi Cozzi (Lewis Coates was his pseudonym). Cozzi is not one of the more respected Italian filmmakers but he did make some low-budget trash that I enjoy, like the awesomely bad Hercules movies starring Lou Ferrigno. This is a movie that borrows heavily from Alien and also a little from Lucio Fulchi's horror flick Zombie, two hits from the year before this came out. Of the handful of Cozzi movies I've seen, this is actually one of the more technically proficient. Don't get me wrong, it's still only enjoyable as the cheese that it is, but there are no visible boom mics or anything that would put this in Ed Wood territory. There's a good deal of gore and splatter effects which are fine considering the budgetary constraints. The music is provided by Dario Argento's favorite band, Goblin. It's actually the best part of the movie and helps to build tension and create atmosphere in some scenes, such as when McCulloch's character recounts what happened on Mars. Speaking of McCulloch, he's just one of the hammy actors displaying their talents here. You have to expect a degree of bad acting from these things, particularly where dubbed dialogue is involved. It's not a good movie but it does have some "so bad it's good" qualities that make it watchable. Spaghetti horror fans will like it more than most.

In an abandoned ship in Ney York harbor, coffee boxes are found containing green eggs that have the same effect as 'chestbursters" did in those Alien movies. So you know there are gonna be lots of exploiding bodies (both humans and rats) in this ultra-cheesy Italian rip-off of "Alien". It Is fun though (the begining and end, not so much the middle) if you're into Italian horror, which I am. It has a cool Goblins score as well. But why the hell would you have a shower scene and NO nudity??!!? what a waist. I'll tell you this though, the part in that "Nightmare on Elm Street" movie where freddy swallows one of his victims whole doesn't seem to be all that original now.

Blue Underground DVD Extras: 'Alien Arrives on Earth' (an 18 minute documentary); a 23 minutes interview with Luigi Cozzi; theatrical trailer; poster & stills gallery; and conceptual drawings

DVD-ROM: Graphic novel

My Grade: B-

I got this movie in one of those "50 Movie Packs" and I expected that at the cheap $20 price tag there would be some bad movies, but this one goes beyond bad. Terrible dialogue, awful acting, a bad plot, and a pretty overall bad movie. That being said, I loved it.

I'm a sucker for bad movies, especially science fiction ones. It is so much like Aliens. The one thing that this movie has going for it is the effects. For the time, the effects are acceptable, if not above average. You get those great stomach exploding scenes, and the corpses on the ship are simply delightful. If you enjoy bad science fiction movies, than this is a film for you. If you want a movie with good acting, look elsewhere.