Review: Contamination (1980)

Directed by: Luigi Cozzi
Starring: Ian McCulloch, Louise Marleau, Marino Masé
Written by: Luigi Cozzi
Music by: Goblin
Country: Italy
Available on: Blu-ray (Arrow)
IMDb

Writer/director Luigi Cozzi’s 1980 Alien ripoff is an underheralded gem. There are a few things that probably come to mind when one ponders the horror scene of the Italian peninsula: gore, terrible dubbing, a bizarre script and acting choices, and great, funky music. Contamination delivers all of these in abundance. The film follows a New York police detective (Masé) who discovers a bunch of large green eggs on a cargo boat shipping coffee beans. Turns out these eggs discharge an icky goo that, when it contacts a living being, causes the living being to explode. This provides plenty of opportunities for a lot of really terrific, if not always convincing, exploding chest cavity effects. It’s up to this sassy, eccentric detective and his newfound sassy, gruff military officer partner/inevitable love interest (Marleau) to track down the source of the eggs. As you can surmise, the plot here isn’t very important nor is it very interesting. But Cozzi’s screenplay does a pretty decent job of moving everything along from point A to point B without lapses into boredom. The first and third acts are filled with action splattered with gruesome death, and while the second act does slow down a bit as the characters go on the side quest to an exotic country that’s required of Italian horror (in this case, Colombia), it’s buoyed by a lot of genuinely amusing banter between the three leads, in which they take turns giving each other shit for anything and everything. Although the ADR is notably bad in all Italian horror, it’s just preposterous here, including one of the most racist impersonations of a Black man I’ve ever heard, here dubbed over a Colombian coffee warehouse worker. It never ceases to amuse me that this is apparently how Italians imagine Americans speak and behave, and Italian filmmakers love to set their movies in America (even if most of them aren’t actually filmed there). All of this absurd nonsense is accompanied by one of Goblin’s best and catchiest scores, although Cozzi underutilizes their cues in favor of an electronic throbbing noise whenever the eggs are onscreen. As with all of the best in horror from Italy, it’s difficult not to be entertained by the sheer audacity, laziness, strangeness, and, sometimes, incompetence at play — and Cozzi’s sci-fi oddity is indeed one of the best.

Overall rating: 8 out of 10