What do you get when you combine Alien, buddy films, '70's exploitation villains, giallo-style gore, and a ton of padding? A freakin' mess, that's what.
Contamination pits the unlikely team of Col. Stella Holmes, a cold-hearted intelligence officer, Tony Aris, an obnoxious NY cop, and Ian Hubbard, a washed-up, bitter ex-astronaut against an evil organization planning to smuggle thousands of bacteria-laden alien egg-fruit into New York City. Their investigation eventually takes them to a South American plantation where Hamilton (Hubbard's old crewmate from an expedition to the Martian polar ice cap) is revealed as the architect of the plan at the behest of his cyclopean alien master.
Sounds like a perfectly serviceable B-movie plot line, you say? I suppose it could have been, if anything in the movie had made any sense. For instance, can anyone explain to me the point of the Cyclops' plan? Are the egg-fruit supposed to wipe out humanity? 'Cause if so, they're woefully inadequate for the job. Sure, anyone caught in the splash radius when they ripen and burst immediately dies a hideous death from fast-acting Explosive Ebola, but the disease is never shown as being able to spread beyond that initial release. So, to kill everyone, you'd have to explode an egg-fruit next to every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth. Are they part of the alien's reproductive cycle? Hamilton seems to think so in one scene, but we see no evidence of that, and Col. Holmes' crack scientific team finds no sign of any embryonic creatures in the eggs, just lethal bacteria. (Good thing, too, because otherwise, judging from the number of burst eggs just left lying around during the course of the film, there'd have to be quite a few baby Cyclops wandering around at the end of the film that no one is even bothering to look for.) Another bit of absurdity Col. Holmes was a major player in the investigation which declared Hubbard insane when he returned from Mars babbling about football-sized green eggs. Yet, when she is called in to deal with the NYPD's discovery of deadly football-sized green eggs, she doesn't make the connection until her science team connects the dots for her.
And those are just two of the bigger holes in the plot, but let's move on to the other problems. Like, say, extensive padding. From supposedly tense scenes that drag on way to long (like when Holmes is trapped in a hotel bathroom with a ripe egg), travelogue scenes showcasing the native splendors of South America, and utterly pointless transitional sequences, Contamination milks virtually every known strategy for extending run-time without advancing the plot.
Or, how about those famous Italian gore effects? Sure, a couple of the early deaths are fairly effective, but by the end of the film, things get really sloppy. Character deaths are foreshadowed by a sudden, conspicuous weight gain (due to the size of the blood'n'guts pack under their costumes) and obvious patches are blown off their outfits when their "guts" explode. And of course, there's the Cyclops. Not a bad design, from a pure looks standpoint, kinda reminiscent of the avocado-creature from one of the old invasion flicks (It Came from Outer Space? It Conquered the World? It
Did Something, I'm Sure), but spiffed up with nicer materials, facial articulation, and a few buckets of slime. But, the finished creature is too big and bulky to actually move around, so it has to be given mind control powers so it can force people to simply walk into its mouth at mealtimes. One could also assume that that's how its getting all these thugs, smugglers, and ex-astronauts to work for it, but that's never addressed in the film. Maybe it just pays really well.
So, while Contamination starts out strong, it rapidly collapses under the weight of its absurd plotting, clichéd characters, and generally poor film-making. And the saddest thing? They wasted a perfectly good Goblins soundtrack on this debacle. My advice? Don't bother with this one.
