Contamination’s opening credits have the balls to claim it’s “based on an original story by Lewis Coates.” It should read, “based on an original story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett,” because what writer/director Lewis Coates (aka Italy’s Luigi Cozzi, the man who gave us Starcrash, the Star Wars rip-off that’s more fun than Star Wars) came up with clearly wouldn’t exist without Ridley Scott’s Alien. In fact, Cozzi wanted to call it Alien Arrives on Earth.

Mind you, I’m not complaining. Cozzi took Alien’s elements of the outer-space eggs and stomach bursting, and ran with them. When you have an effect as cool as an exploding gut, why use it only once? Why not a dozen times? You certainly get your money’s worth. Just ignore the stupid ending.

The intestinal problems start in New York City, when a ghost ship from the tropics wanders into port without a crew — alive, anyway. The conditions the investigating authorities find the seamen in will put you off deli meats for the day. And in boxes bearing a coffee company’s logo are slimy, green eggs that pulsate. Posits one investigator, “It could be somethin’ like a giant squash or an avocado or some kind of mango!”

Despite the decrepit-flesh buffet they’ve just witnessed, another investigator thinks it best to pick the egg up. Let the tummy troubles begin! Who cares if the actors suddenly look pregnant before their midsection blows? Cozzi had the good sense to shoot them all in slo-mo. The eggs even emit a pre-kablooey sound, like sea lions orgasming. Speaking of sound, the great Goblin provides the synth-tastic soundtrack, which is good considering how slowly the film’s final third moves. —Rod Lott

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Here is why I love Dune: It doesn’t work. Not as a drama. Not as a space opera. Not as a war movie. By the basic tenets of comprehensible storytelling, it’s ridiculous. Its overall failure is legendary. But taken as a whole, it’s a twisted dream, rife with spectacularly unique imagery and a baroque, Flash Gordon-like design that never fails to draw me in, even while I’m picking it apart.

But this is what happens when you hire David Lynch, that most idiosyncratic and nonlinear of directors, to adapt Frank Herbert’s dense, sci-fi classic. Lynch pares the plot of a space messiah on a desert planet past the bare essentials to a series of stunning images, tying them together with the most convoluted of narratives, goofy dialogue and aggressively uneven special effects — the first appearance of a sand worm is a classic, but the poor use of green screen would make modern Asylum mockbusters blush with shame.

Yet within Dune lie the seeds of something much greater. Watch as the Guild Space Navigator (an effects wonder) speaks through a grotesque vaginal slit. Gaze upon Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan), his face swollen with boils, hovering beneath a shower of oil. Listen to the absurd rock score by Toto, which under no circumstance should work, yet does so gloriously. View the premature birth of a mutated reverend mother from the inside of the womb.

Dune, again, is ridiculous, with a game cast vastly more talented than necessary. However, by watching it, you glimpse the nightmarish vision of a director who just needed a chance to express himself outside the narrative demands of others. If nothing else, it makes you wonder what Lynch (who was approached) would have made of Return of the Jedi. I bet the Ewoks would have been far more feral, festooned with gaping wounds. —Corey Redekop

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Decades before the flesh-eating virus jumped from science fiction to science fact, there was The Flesh Eaters, the only film from director Jack Curtis (better known as the voice of Speed Racer‘s Pops) and screenwriter Arnold Drake (better known as the DC Comics creator of Deadman and Doom Patrol).

In the prologue, a guy toys with woman by tearing off her bikini top, for which he’s punished by succumbing to flesh eaters of the title. But it’s really about a for-hire pilot (Byron Sanders) whose plane and passengers become stranded on an unprotected island. Their first night marooned, he tells his fare — an alcoholic actress (Rita Morley) and her comely assistant (Barbara Wilkin, who looks fantastic in a bra) — “I can assure you, we are in for a good pounding.”

And how! Their horrors begins by finding a whole human skeleton on the beach, grasping that aforementioned bikini top. Then there’s the glowing fish bones. It’s all due to the “silver stuff” in the water that results in some nifty, surprisingly gory effects on the skin it touches. A beatnik (Ray Tudor) wearing rope sandals doesn’t heed their warnings at first: “Where’s the love, Max? Don’t tell me about that ugly jazz!”

If you think the Nazis may have something to do with it, apply now for your Flick Attack gold star! The person behind it all explains as much when he contracts diarrhea of the mouth. The movie’s 87 minutes spew just as quickly, and the sicko in me wishes the thing were in bloody color. —Rod Lott

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How do you know Terror Beneath the Sea is science fiction? For starters, newspapermen aren’t proactive adventurers. They’re lazy asses. Unless they’re played by Sonny Chiba, of course, as in this harmless, colorful Japanese/American production that offers a rare glimpse of Chiba keeping his hands and feet mostly to himself.

As Ken, he and fellow journalist Jenny (pretty Peggy Neal, The X from Outer Space) attend an underwater, press-only demonstration of the Navy’s new, state-of-the-art homing torpedo, the Bloodhound, the shape of a man flashes across the screen. What could it be?

Later, Ken and Jenny check it out by boating over to the island where atomic waste products are dumped and get their answer: shiny, silver Sleestak-like creatures with crossed eyes too close together, mouths that do not move, and no genitals whatsoever.

And 3,000 feet below underwater city ruled by Dr. Rufus Moore (Erik Neilson), they respond to turns of the dial, i.e. “WORK” and “FIGHT.” There, madman Moore changes the physical structure of humans into these mutated gill-men. That gives way to weird sequences of stop-motion arm pustules, perhaps topped only by cool scenes of underwater miniatures action, as only the Toei Company could do. —Rod Lott

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In 1997, Jonathan Norman was so enamored of Steven Spielberg that he planned to rape him, and the result was a guilty conviction and a 25-year prison sentence.

In 2011, J.J. Abrams settled for consensual reach-around, and the result was Super 8 and a $127 million domestic gross.

Super 8 is so rooted in such early Spielbergian fare as Close Encounters, E.T. and The Goonies that one almost could take issue with it being credited as Abrams’ first film as director not based on an existing property, following his hits with Mission: Impossible III and the Star Trek reboot. It throws in every element in the Spielberg playbook, from the single-parent family to looking up at the sky in awe, mouth properly agape.

Not that that’s a bad thing, when it’s done this well. A group of kids shooting a zombie epic on Super 8 film witnesses a spectacular midnight train wreck during the summer of 1979. Said wreck unleashes a spider-like alien that proceeds to wreck their tiny town, taking all the microwave ovens and sending all the dogs fleeing to surrounding counties.

With hardly a clear glimpse of the creature from another planet, Super 8 is best when it’s barely concerned with the beast. The film’s “scares” are more feel-good than frightening (think Gremlins). And contrary to the belief of Abrams’ unflinching cultists, there’s no mystery to the picture, except why Ron Eldard agreed to wear the Gérard Depardieu wig the entire time. —Rod Lott

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