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Terminator II
Shocking Dark
Alienators / Aliens 2 / Contaminator
Italy 1990
produced by Franco Gaudenzi for Flora Film
directed by Bruno Mattei (as Vincent Dawn)
starring Christopher Ahrens, Haven Tyler, Geretta Geretta, Fausto Lombardi, Mark Steinborn, Dominica Coulson, Clive Riche, Paul Norman Allen, Cortland Reilly, Richard Ross, Bruce McFarland, Richard Berkeley, John Champion, Massimo Vanni, Elain Richmond, Al McFarland, Jim Pelot, Patricia Sedoc, James Sampson, Robert McFarland, Lorenzo Piani
written by Claudio Fargasso (as Clyde Anderson), music by Carlo Maria Cordio, special makeup effects by Franco Di Girolamo, special creature effects by Francesco Paolocci, Gaetano Paolucci
review by Mike Haberfelner
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The future: All that's left of Venice, Italy, is a giant underground
lab owned by the Tubular Corporation - and now it seems something's wrong
with the lab, too, as communication has broken off, and thus the
corporation sends in the marines along with one of their people, Fuller
(Christopher Ahrens), as guide and an independent scientific advisor,
Sarah (Haven Tyler). Soon, our group of heroes learns what it's up
against, homicidal mutants, results from an experiment gone bad, and the
marines start to die like flies - but the group also picks up a girl,
Samantha (Dominica Coulson), who must have lived here for a while and thus
must have been pretty good at avoiding the creatures. She soon becomes
friends with Sarah. It soon turns out that Fuller had his own agenda
going into the lab with the others, to bring a sample of the mutant DNA
back to Tubular Corp for reproduction, something which Sarah can't allow -
so he locks her and the girl in with a mutant to get rid of them - but
Sarah and Samantha are saved. Soon enough, the mutants have killed off
all the marines, and that alone would be bad enough for Sarah and
Samantha, but now it turns out that Fuller is an indestructible cyborg,
and he wants the two women dead as well. Bollocks! And the lab will
self-destruct in only a few minutes. Well, good thing then Sarah and
Samantha find a time machine just in time and are taken back to present
day Venice. However, Fuller has found a second time machine and followed
them back. In present day VEnice though, the two women manage to destroy
the cyborg for good ... Stupid science fiction/action flick
that poses as a sequel to James Cameron's Terminator (copyright
laws are somewhat lax in Italy, hence the misleading original title), but
aprat from the ending the film is actually mor of an unofficial remake of
another Cameron-film, Aliens. Of course, this low budget flick
comes nowhere close the quality of these two films, but it is fun in a
trashy sort of way: The characters are mostly cannon fodder, the actors
are uniformly less than great, the location, a rundown powerstation, is
less than convincing, and the final time machine plottwist is utterly
ridiculous. All of this makes up for a bad movie - but if consumed with a
couple of beers and a couple of mates, it might also be the ideal party
flick.
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