Contaminación: Alien invade la Tierra

Contamination is my idea of movie heaven. It is a shining example of the dubbed sci-fi/horror, Euro-trash spectaculars that were produced on a massive scale in the 70s and early 1980s before Europe turned its backs on cheap entertainment and focused on making dreary art-house fare. In my opinion, Contamination is a reminder of all that was great about this, now virtually extinct, film-making phenomenon.

Contamination is generally regarded as the embarrassing bastard child of Ridley Scott's "Alien". While the film does shamelessly steal certain elements from Scott's masterpiece, it is by no means a boring copy. The plot is so twisted and demented, not to mention ludicrous and ridiculous, that it transcends its "borrowed" elements and becomes something almost entirely unique and wonderful. For example, whereas Alien takes place on a deserted spacecraft, Contamination begins on a deserted boat, then moves to New York City, makes a detour via Mars and ends up in a Colombian coffee factory!

In addition to the utterly preposterous storyline, the joys of Contamination are manifold. There is the wonderful 80s synth score, some of the most atrocious acting committed to film, side-splitting dialogue, fantastically ancient cutting-edge technology (the science lab is a marvel of 70s/80s set design), fabulous euro-effects (among them glowing, musical alien eggs, exploding rats and better yet, exploding people) and then there is the Cyclops.

I could probably write a novel just on the glorious Cyclops. What a wonder of latex and wire! The film is worth viewing just for this magnificent creature, with its big, glowing eye and vile snout. This kind of craptastic special effect died a painful death with the introduction of CGI, and movies have been all the worse for it.

Forget the pretentious rubbish clogging up IMDb's top 250 and watch this stunning opus instead. I can not recommend this highly enough.