Contamination (1980)
Just like I can never get enough of misfits taking on suicide missions to defeat the Nazis, just like I can never get enough of underdog athletes beating evil Russians/big city schools/rich country club puds, and just like I can never, EVER get enough of one cop playing by his own rules to single-handedly bring down terrorist plots against our super sweet freedom-loving country, I also can't get enough of alien parasites, pods, eggs, slugs, and Martians getting their icky extraterrestrial butts shot, blown up, frozen, incinerated, stabbed, and just generally kicked by a handful of underpaid, underemployed actors that only look vaguely familiar!
Director Luigi Cozzi (Demons 6, The Adventures Of Hercules, Sinbad Of The Seven Seas) gets an Italian, Canadian, and a Scotsman to play a trio of Americans taking on an alien invasion housed in a Columbian coffee plant. Though a bit of a let down due to the lack of snappy coffee oriented one liners whenever an alien was wiped out (You should've ordered decaf!) the loving attention paid to slow motion chest explosions, an exploding rat, and the description of one character as "whiskey-soaked" easily overcomes that disappointment.
The film starts off with a surefire attention getter. The ghost ship! I think I speak for all of us when I say that nothing is spookier than a deserted barge full of coffee floating into New York City. With this killer barge on the loose, it's up to Brooklyn cop Tony Aris to check it out. The good thing about Tony is that he doesn't have a Brooklyn accent. I think I speak for all of us again when I say that a Brooklyn accent is almost as horrifying as a ghost ship.
The bad thing about Tony Aris is just about everything else. The guy looks like he was just scraped up off the bottom of someone's shoe and he spends a fair amount of time in the film combing his hair, even though he always has the messiest, most unkempt hair you've ever seen in a film not named Eraserhead.
He and some others (including one of those scientific types that is prone to make startling leaps of logic based on zero information) board the ship to investigate what happened to the crew. He finds that they have had all their guts spewed out the hard way and also discovers some strange football-sized green eggs.
One of the eggs is sitting under some steam pipes and ripening due to the warmth generated by the pipes. When these things ripen, they start to pulsate and give off a noise like a bad Goblin soundtrack and guess what happens when you to try and pick the thing up? It explodes and causes your belly to blow up as well! I guess that's a pretty handy natural defense mechanism against those pesky mongooses that steal eggs and stuff.
Some military types are called in and Tony ends up in a decontamination chamber where he meets a lady colonel whose looks are as nasty as her attitude. Her name is Stella Holmes and she's bound and determined to get to the bottom of this exploding egg business, even if it means taking Tony and a broken down astronaut on a field trip to Columbia!
Luigi demonstrates his abilities as a storyteller at this point because he wants us to dislike the cold, bitchy Stella and we instantly do. Of course we hate everyone in this movie and some hilarious scene where Tony melts her heart and she gives him a kiss while they're being held captive in the coffee factory awaiting their fate at the hands of the alien cyclops isn't about to change that.
Once Tony gets decontaminated, we are treated to one of those scenes where the egghead with the microscope pukes out exactly what we're dealing with.
She says that these things aren't eggs, but are in fact some type of bacteria that gets activated by warmth and that it is a silicon based lifeform and not a carbon based one. Every scientist knows that a "non-carbon based lifeform" is Trekkie talk for "alien."
Stella takes about three seconds to figure out that these things must have been brought to Earth and the only interplanetary trip she can think of we took lately was that mission to Mars where a couple of astronauts came back and one of them was babbling about a bunch of eggs and stuff. His partner denied any of this and no one believed this guy so he got drummed out of NASA and now lives in a disheveled bachelor pad, all boozy and crabby and disillusioned and stuff.
Stella looks this guy up and wouldn't you know it, but she was the one that led the charge to get his crazy ass discharged! Oh, do you think the sparks are going to fly? She gets herself slapped somewhere along the way, but even better than that, we get a little flashback of his time on Mars with the other astronaut!
This is a very low budget Mars we're dealing with, so it all takes place in an ice cave which was probably some type of warehouse with a lot of cardboard or foam rubber cave stuff tacked up. It also could have just been a painting that glowed. There is this big light and the other astronaut gets hypnotized by it and that's about all that happened. I think there were also a bunch of eggs laying around.
Hearing this story, Stella knows she has to assemble a crack team of experts to root out these eggs that have made their way to Earth and halt the alien invasion. In spite of this, she takes this astronaut and Tony with her. They have 72 hours to get it done. There wasn't any real good reason for the 72 hour deadline, but it served to keep Stella and company on task so I wasn't about to argue.
Down in Columbia (Stella traced the boxes the eggs were packed in back there) we find out that the bad guy behind all this eggcitement is none other than that other astronaut! He has been taken over by the alien cyclops and his plan is to Fed Ex all these eggs into the sewers where it's really warm and were they will incubate and blow up. These Martian cruds want to breed and take over our planet and this is their latest scheme. Hey, if you want to take over our poop and rat-infested sewers, have at it!
These bad guys know that Stella and the boys are there to foul up things, so instead of just shooting them in street like they usually do in Columbia, they try stupid stuff like planting an egg in the bathroom with her while she showers. It's just like Psycho, but with a big alien egg! Later when Stella and Tony get themselves captured at the coffee plant, instead of just putting a bullet in their heads, they tie them up and make a big production of bringing them to the alien cyclops. To be fair, Tony did finally get eaten, but all the delays allowed the good guy astronaut to appear and muck things up.
No doubt about it, this one more than satisfies all the requirements of your typically skid row Italian splatter films! Ample gore, lots of slimy, throbbing eggs, badly dubbed unnatural dialogue, a Goblin score, and Ian McCulloch of Zombie and Zombie Holocaust ensure that the movie is all that it is supposed to be! Very effective - I don't drink coffee to this very day! (It makes my bowels seize up.)