Contamination (1980)

Dir: Luigi Cozzi

This lovably goofy sci-fi/horror crossover starts with a bunch of alien eggs finding themselves transported from Mars into New York on a mysterious abandoned boat. Sounds boring but it turns out - and get this! - that if you get any goo from the eggs on yourself, YOU EXPLODE. Yeah. EXPLODE. Like, totally. From the guts out. IN SLOW MOTION, no less. A tough talking army colonel, an alcoholic astronaut and a wise-cracking cop try to save the world from the explodey eggs but the odds are stacked against them as more and more keep appearing... IN THE UNLIKELIEST OF PLACES! In many respects, Contamination is unashamedly B-Grade, taking its cues from the schlockiest of 50s drive-in classics and loading itself with corny dialogue and cheap laughs. In others, however, it's surprisingly polished. There are some really slick sequences, a lot of cool location shooting and some decent (and very splattery) special FX. There's a budget here and it's put to impeccable use. It's the kind of film that could never be made now; if anything, it's maybe the only true posthumous postscript of drive-in chic. A loving full stop at the end of an era. Whatever else though, "Contamination" is a blast. Endlessly entertaining. ***

Monsters (2009)

Dir: Gareth Edwards

Set sometime in the near-future, a NASA probe containing alien creature samples has crashed over Mexico. These creatures are giant, dangerous squid-like beasties who can't be controlled and, as a result, parts of Mexico are sealed off as Infected Zones. A photographer is assigned to get his boss's daughter home from Mexico and the film follows their journey through said Infected Zones back to the US border. Monsters is a bizarre, low-key film and one that doesn't always work. Too much of the film is spent on filming our heroes walking through bleak locations in silence when it could be spent on character development and the pace drops almost unbearably in the middle. However, it is all impeccably shot and directed, the story is unusual enough to resonate and the unexpected ending comes from out of nowhere and is - most shocking of all - really rather beautiful. **1/2

The Violent Kind (2010)

Dir: The Butcher Brothers

The Butcher Brothers have another crack at genre-hopping horror in a similar vein to their earlier effort, "The Hamiltons". Again, we're faced with a slightly lopsided family; in this case a group of bikers who go up to their isolated cabin in the woods for a party and wind up staying overnight when their engines stop working. This leads to, at first, a kind of "Sons of Anarchy" meets "The Evil Dead" type affair but soon takes a turn for the seriously weird. I won't spoil it because I quite enjoyed watching it unfold without having any idea what was going to happen and, for that, I've got to give them credit. Arguably, "The Violent Kind" bites off a little more than it can chew by throwing so many elements into the mix but the script and performances are all pretty strong and I do gives points for originality. **1/2

I Sell The Dead (2008)

Dir: Glenn McQuaid

Wildly inventive period piece in which two grave robbers boost their trade by supplying a more exotic product. Sadly, once they start exhuming the corpses of vampires, zombies and aliens (!), this attracts the attention of some very unsavoury local characters. Building up slowly, this one goes from the sublime to the ridiculous quite effortlessly and while it could maybe do with a little polishing, there are enough outlandish ideas, hilarious one-liners and Abbot & Costello style japery to ensure a good time is had by all. Dominic Monaghan and Larry Fessenden make a formidable double-act and their arch-nemeses, the Murphys provide the missing link you never knew existed between Charles Dickens and Quentin Tarantino characters. A strong debut. More like this one, thanks. ***

Bleak Future (1997)

Dir: Brian S. O'Malley

Quirky no-budget 16mm effort that pits post-apocalyptic mutants against one another in a race against time! Slangman (Frank Kowal) is a dictionary-toting anti-hero who, with the help of a mute Scotsman and a quirky blonde actress, embarks on a quest to find 'the source' (this appears to be a compact disc - or possibly a library - I lost track). A number of others are searching for this too, including King Malice (a mutant with two faces, one that spits goo) and Doctor Obvious (a punk rock prophet who believes himself the smartest man in the world). It all culminates with a ton of fake gore and terrible puns. To be honest, as hard as it tries, "Bleak Future" is one ghastly, Godawful mess. There's some talent and enthusiasm here, but the best thing about the movie is, by far, the Pig Latin subtitles on the 2007 DVD release. If only the screenplay were anywhere near this funny! I'd like to think it's because director O'Malley has genuinely gotten funnier in the 10 year interim. Might have to watch another of his to fully conclude. *1/2

Deep Evil (2004)

Dir: Pat Williams

Zero-budget, made-for-TV alien horror in which a bunch of painfully miscast scientists and military types are sent into a secret cave on a top secret government mission. An 'experiment' has escaped and someone's gotta stop it. Uwe Boll favourites Ona Grauer and Will Sanderson provide much unintentional amusement (especially Sanderson's Southern American accent - "Spah-ders!") and the script is actually quite lively to begin with, but the movie falls apart after about 45 minutes. It takes over an hour before anyone is killed off and badly-lit shots of people in protective headgear (that comes off very easily, so that Grauer can shake her hair about) get old fast. The CGI effects are, hands-down, the worst I've ever seen (especially the CGI helicopters) and the science behind the aliens makes absolutely no sense at all. The ridiculous twist at the end is even more obvious than the fact that none of the cast have ever been to acting school. It's a shame because somewhere in amongst the gibberish, there's half a good idea here, but it just plays like a poor man's "Resident Evil". I admit I've seen a lot worse in my time but, unless you're enough of a Will Sanderson junkie to extract joy from his bad accent, this is probably not worth the rental. *1/2

Big Meat Eater (1982)

Dir: Chris Windsor

A no-budget musical horror in which a small town butcher hires a large, fez-wearing weirdo (the titular character) as his assistant. From here, everything goes to pot. Dogs end up in the sausages, townsfolk get fed to one another, the mayor ends up as a zombie, a troupe of Turkish dancing girls are taught how to "boogie to the front, boogie to the back", alien robots hide a rare fuel (balonium!) underneath the shop, then both the butcher and a local boy genius are temporarily mutated into paper-maché green-skinned monsters! This is all punctuated with clumsy, tune-barren song and dance numbers, execrable dialogue and zero production values. It sounds almost fun but it's painfully slow (endless padding shots) and so ludicrous as to actually achieve almost 100% incoherence. There's certainly little attempt at a linear storyline and the jokes, while pleasingly absurd at first, soon get excruciating. The rhyming couplet, "I'm a big meat eater, yes I am / I'm a big meat eater, pass the ham" is about the best thing about this movie. It makes Plan 9 look like Plan 1. EL BOMBA!

Zone Troopers (1985)

Dir: Danny Bilson

Ahh, good ol' Empire Pictures in their 1980s hey-day. No budget too low, no concept too high, no monster too ludicrous. This cute and affectionate homage to the old-school B-graders concerns four American GIs who get caught behind enemy lines somewhere in Italy circa 1944. Not only do they have to contend with squadloads of nasty Nazis but there's also been a space-rocket ship crash nearby. Seems Hitler's quite eager to experiment on the alien survivors so it's up to our American heroes to save the day and rescue the cuddly, big-eyed pod-creature from his clutches. Self-aware hilarity ensues. This one aims more for laughs than scares and is brightly photographed, well-acted and, for the most part, good fun. Maybe best reserved for Saturday morning hangover viewing but worth a watch for the authentic dialogue, high spirits and a magnificent scene in which a character called Mittens slugs Hitler. ***

Mucha Sangre (2002)

Dir: Pepe de las Heras

The irrepressible Paul Naschy stars in this oddball Spanish comedy-horror about a race of alien-zombies that invade Earth in human form. Their intention is to eat the ovaries of our women (in breadcrumbs, no less) and inseminate our men, thus reproducing their own race in some complicated manner (it gets explained in a Powerpoint presentation involving muppets and nude pin-ups). The only way to kill them is by shooting them in the balls and it's down to an inept pair of narcotics cops and a criminal called 'The Gouger' (who has a beer bottle cap tatooed on his head) to save the world! In its dreams, this film blends the gonzoid gore of early Peter Jackson with the stylised bullet ballets of John Woo. Sadly, the atrocious production values make it play more like a bad porn movie and the Spanish idea of what's funny and cool (ie: policemen who eat faeces, farting zombies who follow through, endless gay rape and Paul Naschy shouting "pull down your pants!" every five minutes) probably doesn't tally with the rest of the world's. There are one or two good bits (a zombie getting its head chainsawed off 20+ times, only to keep regenerating as the mountain of heads piles up on the floor) but overall it's just too puerile and badly written to really work. Naschy's own films, even when he had his tongue-in-cheek, had a certain class to them which the makers of "Mucha Sangre" could've benefitted from. *1/2