Contamination

Contamination (1980) is an Italian-German sci-fi horror from Luigi Cozzi that you can watch online on iFILM. A cargo ship steams into New York harbor with no one alive aboard, and down in its hold sit rows of pulsing green alien eggs.

Police and medics board the vessel and find the crew torn apart. The trail leads to alien spores loaded with flesh-dissolving acid and points back to a coffee plantation deep in South America. A burned-out former astronaut, a government agent and a hard-nosed detective are pulled in to find the source before the eggs spread. Ian McCulloch and Louise Marleau lead the cast, with a throbbing score by the band Goblin.

This is a shameless Italian answer to Alien, once branded a "video nasty" in Britain for its exploding-torso gore. The budget is small, but the sticky practical effects and paranoid momentum more than make up for it. A treat for fans of trashy late-'70s and early-'80s European horror. Stream Contamination (1980) online on iFILM.