Contamination

I went into it expecting a cheap but fun Alien rip-off. And in the first few minutes, my expectations were met – the beginning introduces a very tense and close atmosphere, and the exploration of the bowels of an abandoned ship is gripping. Early on, and quite unexpectedly, I was confronted with the now-classic scene of the bursting human chest, which rightly put the film on the video nasties list and left cinemagoers with some really unforgettable scenes. However, I’m only talking about the first quarter of an hour of the film – everything that follows is already drowning in the inability of the screenplay to build at least a bit of a thrilling and meaningful story, so for the rest of the film we get a plot aping a crime thriller, but that is almost reminiscent of a stupid and tired parody of Bond films with infuriating characters, and forget about the horror atmosphere, it’s just GONE. (06/01/2019)

Contamination is a pretty horrible example of VHS dreck and overblown bubbles called video nasties. That famous list and effort undertaken by the delirious activist Mary Whitehouse can be seen as the most brilliant PR campaign in the history of cinema, because it still to this day brings absurd profits to distributors and producers of hopeless trash flicks. Contamination features about three truly impressive and spectacular splatter shots of exploding chests, but this paraphrase of third-rate 1950s B-movies about alien invasions is otherwise just an overly drawn-out, tiresome nothing. For that matter, it is more than obvious that the film was made as a typical VHS trash flick, where the only condition was to shoot a handful of attractive shots that could be slapped together into an enticing trailer and the rest of the film could be made up of any kind of filler. And that is exactly what happened in the case of Contamination, which is mostly composed only of uninteresting chatter and travelling somewhere. A female special-forces officer (appropriately dominant, but – in line with the requirements of the genre – confused and, of course, totally hysterical in key situations), a randomly recruited cop (a daddish hunk oscillating between the poles of boyfriend and comical character) and a former astronaut (a shadow of his former self, but of course still a total badass) set out on their own to find the origin of alien eggs on Earth. The essence of the film is boiled down into a would-be suspenseful sequence in which someone slips an egg into the officer’s bathroom, which is stretched out to a terrifying 12 minutes (!) that feels like half of the whole film’s runtime. (19/03/2023)