CONTAMINATION .7
** Out of 5
Tagline- They Hunt, They Feed, They Kill, You’re Next
Release Date- October 18th, 1993
Running Time- 91-Minutes
Rating- R
Screenplay- Daniel Steel & Albert Lawrence
Director- Martin Newlin (Fabrizio Laurenti)
Starring- Mary Sellers, Jason Saucier, Bubba Reeves, Chelsi Stahr, Vince O’Neil
Released in 1993 Contamination .7, which also goes under the titles, Creepers, the Crawlers, Troll III and Troll III: Contamination Point 7, is a rather poor flick and the multiple titles is probably a way to trick people into seeing this junk. The credits list Martin Newlin as director, which is Fabrizio Laurenti under an alias (can’t say I blame him for using one), but other sites also list David Hills as one of the directors, which is none other than the infamous Joe D’Amato. Regardless of if both directed the film or not its just terrible and at this point the Italian horror film, which gained some popularity on the international market in the 60s and remained popular through most of the 80s was dying by the end of the 80s and was dead by 90s, as the top filmmakers were either dead or lost their touch and in some cases the hack filmmakers were still putting out their junk with even worse results and really the only exception was Dario Argento and outside of the underrated Trauma the rest of his work from the 90s on was hit or miss. With Joe D’Amato throuh his career he bordered decent filmmaker to hack and while I personally dislike the good majority of his work he did make a truly excellent film with Beyond the Darkness and while I don’t like Grim Reaper I did like what he was aiming to do with the film, which was very mixed in execution.
The plot revolves around the dumping of nuclear waste is a forest, which results in the trees in the forest coming alive and killing people. Basically there is your plot with little else except the subplot of a former couple working on their relationship.
The screenplay was written by Daniele Stoppa under the name Daniel Steel and Albert Lawrence. According to other sites Rosella Drudi & Fabrizio Laurenti also took part in the writing and its amazing that this film needed this many writers for such a poorly plotted film. The script while has a decent idea never fully works and characters are lifeless and dull with others being complete morons that are better off dead. Dialogue is often silly and while at times its meant to be funny, but a lot of the times the comedic aspect isn’t intentional. The screenplay is simply a bore and while Italian horror may not always mentioned for their writing (though the 70s had some well written films) the script for Contamination .7 is complete garbage and its no surprise Italian horror died a painful death when trash like this was made.
Since only Martin Newlin is listed as director I’ll only mention him. The pace of the film is quite sluggish and the overall production sloppy. There is zero suspense and tension and as the film goes on it can be quite a task to get through. As I mentioned earlier at this point Italian cinema was dead and buried and when seeing films like this it really isn’t difficult to understand why. The film is poorly made the direction flat, pacing is slow and boring and with the exception of 1 scene the lack of gore further sinks this film.
Contamination .7 is a very poor film that for the good portion of the running time is a total bore and even the most die hard fans of Italian cinema probably won’t feel much different than I do. This was one of the last films by Joe D’Amato as after this the good bulk of his work would be porn films and based off what I read he didn’t fair much better.
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