User Reviews

Contamination .7, or The Crawlers as I think it's more commonly known, is set in the small American town of Littleton where Josie (Mary Sellers) has just returned after several years away to reunite with her family there & her ex boyfriend Matt (Jason Saucier) as well. However Josie has picked a bad time to return home as the corrupt head of a nearby nuclear power plant has been stealing the money used to safely dispose of radioactive waste & dumping it in the local woods which has the unwanted side effect of producing mutated killer roots which have a taste for human flesh! Can the residents of Littleton save themselves from becoming tree food?

This Canadian production has Martin Newlin credited as director but that's just a pseudonym for Fabrizio Laurenti & the IMDb also claims Joe D'Amato had something to do with it but the version I saw only had one credited director, anyway this has a pretty bad reputation & I can't really say it's undeserved. The script by Laurenti, Albert Lawrence & Daniele Stroppa is an eco-horror with a message, basically pollution is bad. Now this sentiment is all very well & good but it would have helped if there was a decent film behind it & then there's the fact that Contamination .7 is far from the first film to tackle this issue. The character's & dialogue are poor, their decision making is hopeless & at times strange, some of the scenes here are just plain ridiculous & make no sense, it's too long at 100 odd minutes, it has next to no gore or exploitation & it's just very badly written & thought out right down to a none event of an ending. Having said that I actually found it watchable in a really bad kind of way, I don't know why but I was actually glued to it! Maybe just to see how bad it got I don't know but I've certainly seen worse & there was just something here that I liked, I mean I didn't like it much but as far as I'm concerned I saw something in it.

Director Laurenti doesn't impress here with plenty of continuity mistakes & probably the single most pathetic model bulldozer special effect ever, the model they use is obviously a kids toy & it looks terrible. Then there's the killer roots themselves who never really do much apart from wrap themselves around people & we never see what they are attached to either. There's no gore here except one scene when the corrupt Sheriff has a root enter his mouth & exit through his eye socket...

Technically this is alright, forget about the continuity mistakes, it's quite well made & beats hands down many low budget horror films that are made these days. The acting is poor by an obviously amateur cast some of whom appear to have been very badly dubbed in particular the Sheriff.

Contamination .7 is a terrible film for sure & I'm not saying otherwise but for some strange reason I sort of liked it for what it is, don't get me wrong as 99.9% of the film going public will hate it with a passion but I guess I'm in that 00.1% minority & proud of it although I'm not quite sure what that says about me.

This fatally silly B horror picture is much more of a time waster than even a time killer. Sometimes its glaring incompetence does generate some genuine chuckles, but for the most part this is one movie that even die hard fans of the genre can safely pass by. The acting is terrible even for this sort of thing, the script is pretty blah, the dialogue is lame, and there's a serious lack of thrills from start to finish. The special effects are no more than adequate, although there is *some* good makeup here and there. In the directors' chairs are notorious Joe D'Amato (using his David Hills pseudonym) and Fabrizio Laurenti (here billed as Martin Newlin); the prospective viewer is really better off visiting, or revisiting, D'Amatos' "Buio Omega" instead.

Sexy young Josie (Mary Sellers) returns to her rural home town after some time in the big city, in time to get caught up in strange events. It seems that the trees in the nearby forest are contaminated with radioactivity (because, of course, there's a nuclear power plant in the vicinity) and now they've become predatory, with roots that lash out and snare a number of hapless victims. Josie is among the insipid heroes also including her would-be boyfriend, Matt (Jason Saucier), investigative reporter Brian (Patrick Collins), who's the grandson of one of the locals, and drunken scientist Taylor (Bubba Reeves), who realizes early on that there's a danger.

Overall, an uninteresting and barely entertaining feature that features what has to be one of the worst acting performances that this viewer has ever seen, by Vince O'Neil as the sheriff. He makes some of his co-stars seem like Olivier by comparison. All of this leads to a very, very absurd finale where the townsfolk band together to do something, although one has to wonder *what* they hope to accomplish. It makes no sense whatsoever. You add to this the extremely overused "It ain't over yet!" final moment and the end result is an inane mess that *should* fade into obscurity.

Four out of 10.

This movie wasn't just bad, it was stupefyingly, mind-numbingly bad. If I were in any way connected to the production this film... in ANY way.. I would sue to have my name removed from the credits, then legally change my name, renounce my United States citizenship, apply for gender reassignment surgery and then move to the most remote corner of the planet, just to avoid being associated with it.

How might I put this in comparative terms, film to film? This movie makes "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" seem like "The Avengers" by comparison.

The acting was beyond atrocious... worse than 1970s era porn. The scene where the two would-be corporate hit men get killed was genuinely, laugh-out-loud ridiculous. This movie is like a snowball of stupidity rolling steadily down the side of Mt. Everest. I had to keep watching just to see if it could get any worse as it went along. On that count, it did not disappoint.

I do have to tip my hat to the actor playing the corrupt sheriff in the film. His may have been THE worst performance that I have ever seen in any film. You may very well wish to gouge your eyes out with a dull, rusty spoon and lobotomize yourself with a barbecue skewer after watching this bomb.

Big city girl Josie (Mary Sellers) has just arrived back in her small Alaskan hometown for an extended stay with her mother and kid brother, and decides to possibly reconcile with her former high school boyfriend Matt (Jason Saucier) while she's there. Down at the nearby nuclear power plant, illegal chemical dumping (part of an obligatory and half-assed cover-up subplot) has resulted in animated, super-intelligent, radioactive tree roots that are killing everyone off. Victims include an obnoxious sheriff, a female hitchhiker passing through town, a farmer and his wife, a hooker with a heart of gold and a gas station attendant and his pet dog Chester. The roots mostly just trip or strangle people and make a hilarious whip-cracking noise whenever they attack. They also make a (toy) helicopter explode by pulling it about two feet to the ground. During the film's one and only bloody scene, the roots go into a guy's mouth and then poke the eyeball out of a mannequin head. And that's about all she wrote with this dull-as-dishwater waste of time, which would be totally forgotten by now if not for a misleading title change linking it to the notoriously awful camp classic TROLL 2. So be forewarned, no trolls make an appearance in CONTAMINATION.7 (aka TROLL 3). Hell, there aren't even any goblins.

And unfortunately, while TROLL 2 failed in an enjoyable awful way, this one fails to reach that film's same level of redeeming unintentional hilarity. Though thoroughly inept, it's also boring, clichéd, slow-moving and far too tame to really be enjoyable. The fact they used inexperienced local "talent" to fill out the cast, along with providing these laughably bad amateur thesps with truly rotten dialogue throughout the film, is the only point of possible enjoyment, though even that got old quickly.

Probably best known as THE CRAWLERS here in the States, though the version I viewed was titled CREEPERS. Don't know if that's a cut version of this film or not, but I highly doubt it. I'm also not sure of Joe D'Amato's actual involvement since his name (or "David Hills" for that matter) is nowhere to be found in the credits. Only one director is listed and that's "Martin Newlin;" the same alias used by Fabrizio Laurenti for the Linda Blair/David Hasselhoff film WITCHERY (1988).

I had heard this film was awful, but I did not take heed of this warning. Instead, I thought, it might be a 'it's so bad it's good' movie. I had also heard that this film was also packaged as "Troll 3", which had me perplexed as I knew the film was about killer trees so how could they tie this film to that one...well I found out! The acting is on par with that scene in "Troll 2" where the guy goes, "There eating her, and then they are going to eat me...oh my god!" Except, the horrific acting is all through this film, there are no good effects aside from one okay kill and most insane is that there is no nudity! I mean, these girls are nobodies, how can a movie maker not get a bunch of nobody actresses to get naked? Not that I wanted to see the mousy lead girl, but the girl they tease as the star was attractive and the hooker had nice cleavage. This film was made by MGM, the same company that brought us the superbly entertaining "Return of the Living Dead" which featured actors of note and they got Linnea Quigley to not only go topless, but full nude and she is an incredible actress compared to the idiots in this film! So you get nothing! Most of the kills are off screen, the sex is off screen and what we get on screen are a bunch of people you will want dead by the film's end. I will be honest, I was pulling for the roots to kill the entire town, and especially that annoying kid! All they did was tease though...

The story has a couple of girls coming to a small town. At first, they make it out that this one girl who was rather attractive was going to be the lead one, but that was just a tease. No, our main girl is this mousy looking girl coming home is the lead one. It's a shame, because not only was the other girl more attractive, but she was probably the best actress in the film...of course, that is not saying much at all. Well seems a guy at the local power plant has been detecting radiation outside the plant and there is something shady going on. People start turning up dead as there is one off screen kill after another. Finally, we learn that the plant is illegally dumping waste into the woods which causes the roots, not the trees mind you, to come alive and kill people and if you think there is a scene that is as hot as the DVD cover of this film, then you are going to be sorely disappointed.

This film was just bad on so many levels. I do not see how MST3K missed this one, except perhaps it is because it was made by a major distributor in MGM and was fairly new (1993). Granted, I thought the film was from the 80's as I cannot believe this one was made the same year as Jurassic Park, heck, I cannot believe it was made the same year as Super Mario Brothers! The effects of the roots were ripped straight from Evil Dead and at times it looked somewhat okay, but even when it looks good it gets totally undone by the bad acting going on. I also love the scene where they describe the girl from the beginning who got killed and people say she was blond when she was clearly a brunette.

So bad, bad and bad. I did not enjoy it as it gave me nothing. Had they given me some more gore and nudity it would have been more watchable with a shortening of the run time as well. As is, it seemed to take forever to get to the kills and then you think it is going to wrap up and the whole town comes in and they start preparing for their counter attack on the roots. How MGM, who made good horror films, came out with this crap I will never know. I have seen adult movies with better acting and effects than this, I have seen straight to DVD horror films shot with a video camera that are better than this! Heck, this is a film that Manos is better than! Not a good film, fails miserably on almost every front.

Radioactive waste from a nearby nuclear power plant that's been illegally dumped in the woods causes the trees in said forest to mutate into lethal man-eating plants. Sounds like a good deal of incredibly silly and kitschy fun, right? Well, it sure ain't remotely amusing or entertaining, thanks to flat (non)direction, a painfully plodding pace, terrible acting from a lame no-name cast, a meandering narrative, cruddy (far from) special effects (the killer tree roots look like dirt-caked garden hoses!), precious little in the way of graphic gore, zero tension or creepy atmosphere, insipid characters, laughable attack scenes, plain cinematography, a drab and uneventful script, and a generic brooding hum'n'shiver synthesizer score. Worst of all, this excruciatingly tedious clinker proves to be way too limp and lifeless to even qualify as enjoyable in a so wretched it's weirdly wondrous sort of way. Only the positively ludicrous solution that the imperiled townspeople come up with for fighting back against the trees manages to achieve a certain jaw-dropping campy hilarity. That aide, this one overall sizes up as one pitifully dull'n'dismal yawner.

This has to be my least favorite entry in the Troll saga, it was directed by Joe D'Amato, a director that I like, really, some of his movies I didn't care for, but I love some of his movies, this is one of his weaker films, it wasn't directed by him entirely, it was also directed by Fabrizio Laurenti, the film itself is very boring, the plot is interesting, but some of the films time is dedicated to this uninteresting love story that goes nowhere, the only parts that I consider to be interesting, where the scenes when a scientist was trying to expose a company for contaminating the forest, some of the gore scenes were pretty OK, even if they were bad, they are at least entertaining, if you are aware that you might be bored maybe you'll get some enjoyment out of the most interesting parts.