The unauthorised Italian sequel to Terminator that was somehow legal
James Cameron has this strange habit. Every single time he makes a movie, people pretend like his career is over. Whether it’s a 3D movie that’s Dances With Wolves in space, or a melodrama about the world’s most famous shipwreck, or an unkillable cyborg Terminator played by a bodybuilder, it’s expected to flop, but they never do.
The first time that really happened was, surprisingly, with a project of his that should have been a no-brainer. He’d made his name with the grotty little cyber-punk time travel thriller The Terminator in 1984, and after hitting big with Aliens and The Abyss, he made a sequel to it nearly a decade later in 1991.
It was an odd move that no one was really asking for in the first place, and that didn’t seem to have any place in the cinematic landscape of the early 1990s. Then, there were these frankly baffling reports that he’d made The Terminator the good guy in it!?
People were deeply suspicious of Cameron’s plans for Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Perhaps, he didn’t need to do it at all. After all, there’d already been a Terminator 2 released in 1989. That’s right, two whole years before Cameron showed the world the aqueduct chase, “Hasta la vista, baby”, an Italian movie director by the name of Bruno Mattei had carpet-bagged the honour.
I don’t think I’m surprising anyone by saying that the whole thing was deeply unauthorised, but is it illegal? Weirdly enough, thanks to a bizarre quirk of Italian copyright law, it wasn’t. You see, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Italian law stated that a film could be released as a sequel to an existing property without owning the rights to it. At the time, the world was a big enough place that the legal department of a Hollywood movie studio shouldn’t come sniffing. In theory, as long as it didn’t leave Italy in any major way, they didn’t have a problem on their hands.
Seemingly, Mattei, along with writer Claudio Fragasso and producer Franco Gaudenzi, knew that there was precisely zero chance that this film would make it outside of their home country and decided to go all in as a result.
How is this film a ‘Terminator’ sequel?
The Italian film industry had previous for this. The zombie classic Zombi 2 was an unauthorised sequel to George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which had been radically re-edited and redubbed for its Italian release. That version was such a hit there that production began on a “sequel” to it very soon afterwards. This version of Terminator 2 wasn’t quite the same. There hadn’t been a beloved Italian dub or edit of the original film to build on, which was probably why, in many markets, it wasn’t even called that.
In fact, there were several different titles for the picture, including Shocking Dark, Aliens 2, Contaminator and, hilariously, Aliennators.
The sharp-eyed among you might have noticed the presence of another James Cameron title in many of those titles, which is no accident. Whatever you want to call this version of Terminator 2, considering it’s about an infestation of aliens underneath Venice, it has pretty much nothing in common with The Terminator and everything in common with Aliens.
If you go into this expecting a ghoulish, grindhouse delight like Zombi 2, you will be disappointed. Mattei was no Lucio Fulci, and for most of its 90-minute running time, this version of Terminator 2 doesn’t even have the decency to be entertainingly bad. Worth a bash for a bad movie night if only for some of the achievements in terrible acting and the puppets used for the aliens, but nothing more than that. This is one unauthorised sequel that doesn’t deserve any more time in the spotlight than it got.