Cheap Toxic Spawn [Region 2] (DVD) (Luigi Cozzi) Price

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Customer Reviews of Toxic Spawn [Region 2]

Cheesier than anything from Pizza Hut.
Contamination (Luigi Cozzi, 1980) <
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>Not even that great bastion of bad acting, Ian McCulloch (Zombie), can save this schlockfest from B-movie auteur Luigi Cozzi. McCulloch, who doesn't actually show up until halfway through the film despite being one of the main characters, plays Ian Hubbard, a retired astronaut who was part of a Mars mission during which his partner was killed and, everyone seems to assume, he went utterly mad. Skipping back to the opening half of the film, the things Hubbard reported having seen on Mars--strange green eggs deadly to humans--have found their way to Earth, and are uncovered during a raid on a smugglers' ship. Tony (Marino Mase), the only surviving member of the police squad who raided the ship, teams up with Stella Holmes (Louise Marleau), a military scientist who also recruits Hubbard, and the three of them are off to stop the evil alien conspiracy! <
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>Umm, yeah, something like that. It's an Italian gore flick, the plot isn't important. The pace is. The gore is. The effects are. Unfortunately, Cozzi manages to blow the pace at every conceivable turn, the gore isn't around nearly enough, and the effects, especially in the Evil Mastermind(tm), are unintentionally hilarious. This is probably a good one to watch at a party while very drunk, but if you're looking to expand your gore-film horizons, this one should be pretty low on your list. * ½

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no apologies
Once you've made the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "The Thing" and "Aliens" comparisons -- you know, the whole song and dance where aliens enslave the human race popular during the Cold War paranoia craze -- there's really little else to stick around for ... unless you get a charge out of Giallo-inspired, slo-mo, car-crash-intense pneumatic gore, here represented by abdomens exploding in rich, ruby fury, entrails outstretched and flapping like party whistles. There's a heaping helping of these blowouts, fueled by alien eggs that spurt killer puke-colored fluid when heated (or whenever it's convenient), sprinkled throughout this b-minus level sci-fi soaper. There's even a climax featuring "The Cyclops," an oozing alien who's a cross between Medusa, Audrey II and Aloysius Snuffleupagus and had a cameo years later on an episode of "Power Rangers" in which it spoke with a Brooklyn dialect, if I remember correctly. However, if you have ears or, god forbid, you can read subtitles, you're in a for a world of pain: director Luigi Cozzi, whose next venture was "Hercules," is no better at piecing together a script than a pimply, "TRL" Tivo-ing, Wii-drenched teen is at making a latte at Starsucks. <
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>Never mind that the actors all look like they need a good scrubbing; I actually felt like I was watching a dubbed movie because the mannerisms didn't match the words, and these skill-deficient oafs alternate between comatose and manic episodes, with little in between and ill-conceived utterances like "Help! Let me out! There's an egg!" "What killed those men certainly wasn't coffee" and "You couldn't get it up, even if you had a crane" make the brain reel and seem more like poor translations from Italian than comic relief. Even the impetus for humanity's demise, the alien eggs smuggled back to Earth by an astronaut who becomes a puppet of the Martians, isn't sufficiently explained. We know that the astronaut-symbiote who faked his own death re-emerges two years after the expedition to plant the eggs in New York's sewers. How the eggs will go from the sewers to conquer the populace Cozzi never even attempts to explain. But wait, let me back up because the female colonel, who a police lieutenant goes from calling "sir" to trying to get in the sack at the most inopportune times, assures the viewing audience that these aren't eggs, but a virus, then quickly contradicts herself by saying the opposite. And for all the care with which the eggs are handled at first, complete with high-tech hamster-cage incubation boxes and toxin-deflecting rainslickers, this same colonel, sans any protective garb, gets close enough to a batch of "eggs" that she could spoon herself out a sample. Which she should have because a later scene where someone tries to kill her by locking her in a bathroom with an egg combines the worst murder attempt with the worst bid for self-preservation (just cover the damn thing with a towel!) ever captured on film.

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Green Eggs And- BLAM!...
Those horrid aliens are up to no good, as they plot to conquer our planet once more! This time it's green, pulsating eggs that explode in a gooey acid spray! This causes people to burst like ketchup-filled piñatas! Of course, there are eeevil humans helping the aliens to carry out their plot. This leads us to a south american coffee plantation, and the final conflict! Ian McCulloch (Zombie) is not bad as the aging Mars astronaut who must face his worst fears in order to help stop the alien onslaught. Yes, this is another clone of the movie ALIENS, right down to the egg-burning-with-the-flame-throwers scene, but hey, ALIENS itself lifted that scene from the egg-burning in THEM! Anyway, ALIEN CONTAMINATION has just enough going for it to make it enjoyable...