Mind that's not a typo; it's not Contamination Seven, it's Contamination Seven-tenths, which is at least ten times less contamination by my reckoning. Anyway once again nuclear waste is being improperly disposed of by a greedy power plant boss and corrupt local sheriff. In fact I'd go so far as to say their relationship is the very definition of cahoots. Mutant flesh eating trees are the result, although they aren't so much in the picture.

Dammit now there's a kid in it. AND teenagers having love problems. Why isn't there some creepy weirdo's website out there to warn me about these things? At least it's all so tepid and pretend that I can't really work up much hateful rage.

At first I thought this was a fake bad movie - someone deliberately trying and failing hard to make a funny-bad B movie, but I kept feeling like I'd seen this exact sort of horribleness somewhere before. Then it hit me: Troll 2. Italians. Italians have once again come to America with their movie cameras.

Notice how the performers seem as if they are incapable of human speech and just mouthing the sounds phonetically with no inkling that they're words? That happens when you write and direct dialogue in a language you don't understand. Most Italian movies are made in Italy or Spain using actors from all over the known universe and are entirely dubbed. I don't think they even record audio when shooting. That's why you'll see American actors dubbed with their own voices, slightly out of sync with their lips. But for some reason in the early 90s the Italians decided to shoot a couple movies in the USA using the popular English language exclusively, but without hiring English speaking writers or directors.

To point out the obvious, when you are not fluent in a language you don't know when people sound stupid in that language, or if the script you've written bears any resemblance to actual native behaviour. It's exactly as if I wrote a movie in Hindi using an English/Hindi dictionary and then went to Bombay and directed it, and expected Indians to take it seriously and not laugh at me.

That still doesn't entirely explain it though. I mean the acting here is worse than Troll 2. Yes, it's possible. I've seen acting this horrid before, as I think acting has a sort of terminal velocity of how bad it can be, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie in which every line spoken by anyone was like that. I realise this is in the wrong lingo and these people are non-actors they hired off the street, but by the law of averages I'd expect someone in the movie to at least talk normally on their own. I mean we all know how to talk, right? Maybe Italian directors have some skewed notion of how English is supposed to sound and actively force the performers to talk like they're on a public access kiddie show.

I haven't said much about the movie proper, as there's really nonesuch to speak of. Just the train wreck dialogue and once in a while they fling some ropey stuff into the shot with lots of yelling and pretend trees are attacking or something. Troubling to think about how this movie and The Haunting exist in the same universe innit? We're always that close to oblivion.