Prepare to have your mind...contaminated!

Alien Contamination was one of the 72 “video nasties” at the heart of a censorship struggle in the UK during the early 80s. I've seen a couple of these movies, so I was excited to delve into another. Disappointment sets in pretty quickly here.

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The movie opens with an assault of bad dialogue. The terribleness of the sound quality is greatly enhanced by recording the actors through respirators donned to keep them safe from a strange smell coming from a cargo ship. Upon inspection, the crew is missing!

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They find some dudes covered in blood and conclude they exploded(?)! I might have made a similar decision if the lighting had been better. Our crack team of investigators quickly conclude that no bacteria or virus could cause these deaths, and then scramble to prepare for an epidemic. An explosion epidemic? I'm not sure what that would mean, but I guess people would be asked to stay inside. There would probably be a ban on all carbonated beverages, just to be safe. I can also imagine the government issuing some kind of anti-explosion containment girdle to everyone, just to corral the forthcoming mess during this catastrophe.

As you might have guessed, our team soon finds crates of giant avocados (possibly alien eggs) that quickly explode. Naturally, once the goo from the eggs gets on you, you explode as well. That's how these things usually work, in my experience.

We meet a high-ranking female military officer who quickly takes control to start calling the shots. First order: freeze the entire cargo ship. Heat seems to, I don't know, accelerate the eggs? Surely freezing them is the answer. Back in the lab, we learn that these aren't eggs, but masses of bacteria. After using the bacteria to explode a lab rat (for fun?) our heroes immediately intuit that whoever was intended to receive the shipment planned to introduce the bacteria into the sewers. This is obvious, conclusion has no bearing on the rest of the movie.

When they find a warehouse full of eggs, they destroy them with fire. Now, I know what you're thinking. It's usually best to avoid thinking during these movies, lest you become agitated and miss the movie explanation for what's going on. One character comments on how using fire to kill the eggs makes no sense, but he is dismissed with a “I'm only doing my job” containment, which we are left to ponder. All containment protocols are initially heavily enforced and then carelessly discarded almost immediately. The capriciousness is blamed on the woman in charge, who is oddly never in uniform, despite her rank, unless heavy eye makeup counts as a uniform.

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It turns out these eggs are nothing new, since they were seen on a mission to Mars from two years ago. I can see why the space agency wouldn't have followed up on such a monumental finding. Science is hard, and maintaining even the most basic level of curiosity about the world around you is a lot of work. Besides, there's no way the eggs would possess an astronaut and use his body as a puppet to further their race, right? Right?

The film slows to a crawl as we travel to South America, where the eggs originated. One highlight is an “attack” by an egg, which apparently just make sad trombone noises without being threatening in any measurable way. Since the only danger they pose is getting the exploding goo onto you, it seems they could easily be neutralized by covering them with a towel or something. Instead, our heroine has a screaming fit, lightly pounding at the door for quite some time, filmed in a way to pathetically evoke the “Here's Johnny!” scene from The Shining.

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When the movie wakes up, we quickly learn that the eggs are being farmed under the direction of The Cyclops. This large, slimy alien has some telepathic powers (I guess), a few mouths, and a hunger for human flesh. It might be a cousin of Jabba the Hut, though we don't get to learn much about it before it is killed and then spontaneously combusts. And no, it does not explode like every single other thing in the movie, but instead catches on fire. Why not?

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The overall alien plan is never quite clear, so I'm not sure who won in the end. It doesn't matter, really, and this Italian knockoff of Alien is just another in the long chain of imitations that fail spectacularly. It did succeed at presenting lots of uncomfortably tight head shots that linger for far too long, and propagating weird sexual tension that did nothing to develop characters or further the plot. Go watch Galaxy of Terror, The Blob, or even Critters if you are looking for good-bad horrorstuff, and leave this one for the deep freeze. Or fire. Whatever.

Silly spider strangeness

Two stories came across my radar recently, both of which highlight how spiders get involved in strange news stories.

In the first story, we are presented with "evidence" of some kind of giant spider spotted via Google Earth.

Incontrovertible proof!

The image seems pretty straightforward to me: find a satellite image of a remote island and slap a blurry spider image on there. The story about this image surfaced on a UFO blog, including this statement: "...goes to prove that scientists don’t have the slightest clue about the hidden giant species that exist in the oceans of the world."

While it is true that the ocean is poorly explored and even large species can escape our notice...spiders? Really? Spiders? Spiders.

Spiders do not live in the ocean, do not grow to the size of a bus, and would likely have been noticed by now if such spiders existed. If they are coming ashore, then they should be more visible than deep sea giants. Also, they'd have to eat a lot, as spiders are voracious predators. Spiders, as fluid feeders, cannot feed while submerged, though I suppose these giant marine spiders could find a way to make it work. Pushing the obviously ridiculous claim over the edge, the person who shared this image did not include coordinates, thus preventing independent confirmation of the image.

The other weird, though less crazy, thing that happened with spiders in the news goes in an unexpected direction. At a grocery store in Sweden, a large spider (tarantula of some sort) was found in with some apples. Now, as I've described before, large spiders do occasionally show up with bananas, but apples are an unusual crop, especially for coincidental tarantulas.

The real twist here, the one that puts this story in a different category than any spider-in-produce news piece I've ever seen, is that a person was seen putting the tarantula on the apples. So, how do we make sense of this behavior? Was the spider being dropped off, perhaps with the hope it would find its own way in the world? Why apples? Does the Swedish education system create some kind of link between tarantulas and apples? Or maybe this is simply the face of modern Swedish terrorism?

Maybe the owner intended to come back later and pick the spider up, using the apples as some kind of tarantula day care. I'm going to assume this is what was going on, and encourage grocery stores to have a more explicit location for spider drop-off and pick-up. Putting them next to the apples might be ideal, because then the spiders could at least gaze at the sweet, crispy bounty. Please write to your local grocery store and demand a safe, clearly marked place for people (Swedish or otherwise) to deposit their large arachnid pets!

Alien Species? More like Alien Feces! So clever...

Twenty years ago, we were given a great blockbuster alien invasion movie: Independence Day. While there is lots of talk about the needless sequel, nobody seems to be talking about the other alien invasion movie from 1996: Alien Species.

Set in the distant future of 1999 (three whole years beyond when this film was made), aliens visit our planet and immediately set to work on their master plan:

1. abduct a cow and some people
2. destroy a few vehicles at random
3. ?????
4. profit

Fortunately (?) for us, an astronomer, his granddaughter and acolytes combined with some deputies and their prisoners are here to help. After their truck gets upended by a (drunk?) alien pilot, the group takes shelter in a cave (like you do), only to find (uh oh!) the aliens have set up shop in there for, well, it isn't clear. I assumed some kind of alien pottery seminar, though I didn't see a wheel. Perhaps it is an Earthist assumption that a wheel would be involved, so increased cultural exchange between our races is clearly needed. Anyway, the cave is used by our heroes to run back and forth through the same ten or so feet, while the aliens lay waste to a city somewhere.

What's important is that we later learn that being abducted by the aliens means going to the cave to be covered in spiderwebs and/or enclosed in some kind of cocoon. Hatching from the cocoon makes you a zombie, a curious story element that goes nowhere. The humans fail miserably at everything, but they do destroy one ship, which sends the aliens packing. World saved!

This movie is full of ACTING, as shown to us by people who have probably heard of acting, but only over the radio or something. It's filmed almost entirely at night with insufficient lighting to make out a lot of what's going on. I'm filing that second point as an accomplishment, and I think the movie would have been better if it were even darker.

That's more like it!