Contamination

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)

Je me suis lancé dans ce film en pensant voir une pâle mais amusante copie d’Alien. Et durant les premières minutes, mes attentes étaient comblées : l’ambiance du début est lourde, l’exploration des entrailles du navire abandonné captivante… Puis, très rapidement, on arrive à la scène désormais classique de « l’explosion du torse humain » – une scène qui vaut au film une place dans la liste des « video nasties » – et à quelques moments hauts en couleur. Mais ça, ça concerne le premier quart d’heure seulement ; tout ce qui suit s’enlise par l’incapacité du scénario à construire au moins un minimum de suspense et d’histoire cohérente. En conséquence, on se retrouve le reste du temps avec une intrigue policière presque au niveau de la parodie stupide et fatiguée d’un James Bond dans lequel les personnages sont insupportables ; l’ambiance d’horreur, elle, a complètement disparu ! (06/01/2019)