Contamination

A freighter drifts into New York Harbor with no living crew aboard. Investigators find disfigured bodies below deck and, in crates of coffee, a collection of green organic pods, one of them larger and translucent, with something pulsing inside. The eggs are alien, they hold a corrosive fluid that kills anyone who touches what they leak, and this shipment is only the beginning.

Ian Hubbard, a former astronaut whose account of seeing such eggs on Mars wrecked his reputation, is drawn into the case by Colonel Stella Holmes of government security and NYPD Lieutenant Tony Aris. The trail of the pods leads them to South America, to a coffee plantation and to a man Hubbard believed dead. Ian McCulloch plays Hubbard, with Louise Marleau as Holmes, Marino Masé as Aris, Siegfried Rauch as Hamilton and Gisela Hahn as Perla de la Cruz. Luigi Cozzi directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Erich Tomek; Claudio Mancini produced this German-Italian co-production.

Contamination was Cozzi's third feature as director, arriving between Starcrash and Hercules in his filmography, and it runs 95 minutes. On IMDb it holds a rating of 5.1 from roughly 5,800 votes, and on TMDB a rating of 5.2 from 144 votes, which places it among the modestly received Italian genre pictures of its period rather than a widely embraced one.