Contagion 2009

Picture a bleached out, acid washed dime-store version of Blade Runner on a shoestring, bargain budget and you'll have some notion of Sci Fighters, a silly futuristic flick starring lovable wrestler 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper and B Movie stock villain Billy Drago. By most standards it's a miserable little exercise in schlock, but if that's your thing to begin with, it's a pearl. So it's set in 2009, and the film was made in 96', which going by a combination of the math and the severely bleak atmosphere, the filmmakers didn't even stretch their timeline barely past twenty years from their date, showing either amusing carelessness in writing or even more amusing cynicism for where we're headed, and how fast. The setting is Boston, and it's a goddamn slum, with perpetually overcast skies, garbage heaps everywhere and a general sense that people have given up. Piper is Grayson, a hard boiled detective on the trail of a somewhat unusual killer. Far above earth in a filthy off-world prison on the moon, criminal Dunn (Drago) has encountered some weird alien parasite which hijacks his gaunt frame and torpedos back stateside to start a murder spree. Drago vs Piper in a sad-sack, disease ridden Boston is pretty much the suitable logline, and it's not half bad. Piper makes a more grounded leading man than the film deserves, while Drago is straight up certifiable (nothing new) especially when the extraterrestrial, who has a garbled and endearing speech impediment, is controlling him. Effort is put into the atmosphere to some degree, but I feel like the success in achieving mood was probably also by accident of just leaving shit lying around set. A true peculiarity, worth it only for fans of the two actors and schlock-hounds alike.

Cops that shoot like the a-team. bad guy monsters that can't be killed and exhale methane. Probably some good movie in there somewhere if you can sleep through the boring bits.

This really is a great B-movie. Roddy Piper delivers his best performance as an actor to date, ranging from comical to serious to romantic to heartbroken.

The story is very straightforward, but extremely fun and watchable. Considering the budget they had to work with, you really have to admire what they pulled off in this film.

It's very similar thematically to "The Hidden," from 1987. There's a great "unstoppable alien" thing going on here. The chemistry between Piper and the extremely beautiful Jayne Heitmeyer is great. She is fantastic as Dr. Kirbie Younger.

I'll be honest...if you're in to serious A-list films, this is no "Citizen Kane." But if you like great B-movie fun, you could do a whole lot worse than Sci-Fighters. It's B-science fiction gold!

Yeah, pretty much the same plot we've seen in a dozen other such films in the past ten years; but if we know those films, it's because we watched them and enjoyed them; perhaps with some sense of guilt, like there ought to be something better to with our lives, but let's admit we were entertained.

Certainly this film is not among the worst of its ilk. In fact, it is generally well made, with sharp performances from all the actors, including the Rowdy One; and the script doesn't rub our noses in sci-fi-techno-babble, it just gets on with the story.

The big disappointment is the ending; it is rushed, badly directed, badly edited. It feels like it comes looping out of another film, there's no build-up to it at all.

Too bad; if the ending had been as impressive as the rest of the film, I would have given this 8 stars, if only for effort; now it has to live with 6.

That makes it a time waster, like most of the other films of its type - not bad, just not good enough to be memorable.

This wouldn't have been a bad movie if they had a script doctor go over the dialog a bit.

Essentially, the world has undergone a nuclear winter, and a convict escapes a lunar prison after being infected by an alien life form designed to convert the world over to methane, and does so by raping women and infecting them with alien-crabs. Or something. Roddy Piper plays a cop who put the convict away, and Jane Heitmeyer plays the hottie doctor trying to find a cure.

Pretty much, that's all the plot you need to hang the action sequences on. Piper gets into some fights, there are explosions, cheap special effects and some nude scenes. I'm sure this film was made on the cheap, but they got a lot out of a cheap budget.