Contamination

And Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Cheech & Chong.

This is the Italian version of Alien. The main actress is played, I believe, by Sigournia Weaverotta. The main actor is the highly esteemed Doug McClurio.

The badly dubbed dialogue has such gems as: "We have over 400 eggs" "Eggcelent"

The cast has all faded into obscurity except the alien creature who got a job making Slurm in the late 90s.

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.

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.

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 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.