VIDEO NASTIES – Contamination

Published on: 10th August, 2009

VIDEO NASTIES - Contamination  | read this item

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Of all the movies to have felt the wrath of the BBFC during the mid-1980’s, very few of them had been science fiction orientated. Most had fallen under the umbrella of horror or exploitation, and yet whilst the Italian/German co-production Contamination certainly borrowed from the horror genre, it most certainly had its roots in sci-fi. Often dismissed as an inferior rip-off of Ridley Scott’s Alien, released the previous year, Contamination would prove to be commercial failure upon its initial run, yet would somehow anger the British censors a few years later. Lacking the cannibalism of many other Italian productions, the sexualised violence of The Last House on the Left or I Spit on Your Grave, or many of the other elements that would almost guarantee it a place amongst the ‘Video Nasties,’ Contamination was still considered irresponsible and unsuitable for public viewing by the moral majority. It would take two decades for the film to finally gain a release on home video (when the BBFC passed it through uncut in 2004), but just what was it about a low budget sci-fi horror that had caught the attention of the censors?

Contamination was conceived by Italian filmmaker Luigi Cozzi, who was riding on the success of his previous feature, the Star Wars-inspired Starcrash, and desperately wanted to work on another science fiction film. Unfortunately, however, there was little interest in the genre in his native land and so he felt that he had to find a way to convince his producers that it could be a profitable decision. His answer came with the release of Alien, a sci-fi/horror hybrid that was not only critically adored but also a financial success. Through his own independent company, Cozzi had been distributing an array of ’50’s b-movie classics, such as The Thing from Another World and Day of the Triffids, and this fuelled his taste for a genre that he had been in love with since he was a child. When he explained to his producers how Alien had been such a huge success in the United States, they sensed that there could be money made from developing a similar project and so, rather reluctantly, agreed to Cozzi’s suggestion.

Despite having a significantly lower budget than Star Crash, Cozzi set to work on a screenplay that would take elements from various science fiction flicks and mould them into a story that could be produced efficiently. Cozzi’s premise, which he considered to be ‘the illegitimate son of Alien,’ borrowed two key aspects of the American production – the strange eggs that are found and the exploding stomachs as the aliens matured inside their hosts. But, realising that a movie set in space would increase the strict budget, Cozzi decided to set the entire story on Earth, by having the alien eggs discovered on an abandoned ship by a patrolling helicopter. This sequence, the director claimed, was an homage to the opening sequence of Gordon Douglas’ 1954 classic Them!, in which a helicopter descended down on a young girl in the desert, although the filmed scene bore more resemblance to the beginning of Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (itself an unofficial sequel of another American success, Dawn of the Dead), which saw a derelict boat drifting into the New York Harbor. But, in place of the eggs, the investigating police officers instead find a zombie, who infects one of the men by biting and killing him.

Although Cozzi had named his screenplay (which would be co-credited by Erich Tomek) Alien Arrives on Earth, producer Claudio Mancini disliked the title and decided to rename it Contamination, after an abandoned project he had worked on that had been inspired by The Chain Syndrome. Mancini was an experienced filmmaker, having worked under the wing of legendary director Sergio Leone as a production manager on his western epic C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West). Although Cozzi wanted to make a movie in a similar style to Alien, Mancini was more interested in adventure and instructed his director to fashion the story as more of a James Bond-style thriller, resulting in the protagonists travelling from New York to South America in their quest to discover the truth of the aliens. Although Star Crash had been an American-based production, developed in Los Angeles, Contamination was a co-production between Italian company Alex Cinematografica and Germany’s Barthonia Film and Lisa-Film.

The project was extremely low budget, resulting in the filmmakers working out of an office in Via Caroncini that was located in a small building shared with several other companies. When the producers were debating which actors to cast in the movie, one of them overheard a discussion in a nearby office about how much money they had made from distributing Fulci’s Zombi 2. This inspired them to try to cast all of the actors from Fulci’s movie in an effort to capitalise on its success, although due to scheduling conflicts the only actor they were able to obtain was Ian McCulloch, who had portrayed reporter Peter West in Zombi 2, as well as landing a part in the equally notorious Zombie Holocaust (Dr. Butcher M.D.). For the lead role of Colonel Stella Holmes, Cozzi had wanted to cast British star Caroline Munro, who he had worked with on Star Crash and felt she would lend an air of sex appeal to the character, but the producers insisted on a more average-looking actress, eventually settling on Canadian-born Louise Marleau.

Due to the low budget and various locations around Europe and America, the five-week shoot was a stressful and hectic affair. The first three and a half weeks were based in Rome, where most of the interior scenes were filmed, which would include De Paolis Studios and in Tuscolano, where local extras were hired to play the American soldiers. The production then moved onto New York and Florida before completing principal photography in Columbia, for the third act of the movie. Then, when the cast and crew had returned home, Cozzi flew back to New York for two days of location shots, such as skyscrapers and aerial footage. For the opening scene, the wide shots of the helicopter were taken by chance, as it just happened to pass overhead and was not hired by the production. Cozzi was determined to avoid making the movie appear as if it was set in 1980, when it was filmed, and instead asked his costume designer to create generic clothes that could have belonged to any era. He was also specific about avoiding the latest vehicles, instead opting for older cars and jeeps.

The filmmakers were forced to be creative when designing the special effects as the budget would not stretch to anything too complicated. For the alien eggs that are seen in the background during several scenes, the crew painted balloons green using a varnish spray, whilst the ones shot close up were made of silicon and filled with a small light to create the pulsating, glowing appearance. For the stomach-exploding effect, a fake stomach was placed over the actor, with a tube running through their clothing with which compressed air would run through, whilst the prosthetic stomach was filled with cows’ intestines and chicken livers to create the illusion that it was the actor’s guts. As the blood was also created using a varnish, the actors’ clothes would constantly get stained after being covered in guts, resulting in each performer having to have several copies of each outfit so they had a fresh one to wear for each take.

The alien monster that was revealed that the end of the film was mechanical, as the producers had insisted that no optical effects or stop motion were used. Unfortunately, however, the monster was defective and would often refuse to work, forcing the crew to try and move its tentacles by hand. Thus, Cozzi would utilise up to one hundred and ten cuts during editing for that one sequence in order to hide that the monster was broken. Despite the scene appearing to have been shot in a cave, the rocks were in fact painted cardboard. Many of the sets had only been completed prior to filming and so there were various areas that the actors were unable to touch due to the paint not being dry. Shot on 35mm, the filmmakers used special lenses that required less light than an average shoot, making each scene easier to set up and less time wasted on light adjustment.

Once the footage was completed and the movie was in post-production, the producers needed a composer to bring the film to life. Cozzi, being a close friend and protégé of Dario Argento, suggested Goblin, the Italian prog rock group who had previously scored Argento’s Profondo rosso (Deep Red) and Suspiria, both of which were critically acclaimed. Due to the group having disbanded, regular member Claudio Simonetti was absent from the recording. The score would become one of the more referenced aspects of the completed picture and portions would be ’sampled’ in Bruno Mattei’s derivative feature Virus (Zombie Creeping Flesh) the following year. The producers had been pleased with Cozzi’s suggestion of using Goblin as the band had developed a loyal following in Italy and so this would attract attention to the movie.

Contamination made its worldwide debut on August 2 1980 in Bologna. Sadly, however, the film’s performance suffered greatly when members of the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari planted a bomb at Central Station, resulting in the death of eighty-five people. But a later screening was viewed by Menahem Golan of Cannon Film, who was impressed with the picture enough to purchase it for an American release, in which he would rename the film Alien Contamination. But a few years later, Contamination would find its way onto the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP)’s list of offensive movies, more commonly known as Video Nasties. Whilst the BBFC’s James Ferman would often avoid divulging his exact reasons for outlawing a film, the most controversial scenes were of characters who had been infected by the alien virus spontaneously combusting or, more specifically, their stomachs exploding. Despite often being dressed in Hazmat suits which would obscure much of the effects, these shots were mostly graphic and, in some instances, shown in slow motion, before the camera closes in on the bloody aftermath. Contamination was finally passed uncut by the BBFC on March 10 2004 – the once feared and reviled ‘Video Nasty’ now reduced to a 15 certificate.

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