Illustration : Unknown

Genetic Contact
 

Robert Weimer | USA | 1983

Originally made for US cable TV, but later issued on video by Video Tape Centre [VTC] as Anna to the Infinite Power, this freakish little gem from occasional Star Trek: The Next Generation director Robert Wiemer, concerns troubled teen Anna Hart (played by Martha Byrne). This annoying thirteen-year-old wombat has a smörgåsbord of alarming traits, including shoplifting, an inexplicable fear of flickering lights and bizarre prophetic Nazi-orientated nightmares! Anna, who possesses an incredibly high I.Q., nearly swallows bugglegum one afternoon when she spots her exact double on television. With deepening curiosity, the teen pushes further, uncovering a nightmarish plot which reveals more about this strange doppelganger, together with fiendish revelations, in the style of The Boys from Brazil, concerning a “brilliant physicist” named Anna Zimmerman – who has been dead for over twenty years!

With a convoluted plot that draws much of its twisted proceedings from flashbacks involving a power-crazed Nazi officer, known only as “The Commandante”, this PG-rated piece of sci-fi flotsam about genetic manipulation was itself altered by its distributor, Global Sales Ltd. Global re-titled the film to the more punchy Genetic Contact before it disappeared from UK shelves altogether…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Global Sales Ltd released nearly fifty certficated titles under a variety of guises, most notably their Viz Video and Fifth Dimension Movies offshoots. Other chestnuts in the Viz Video reissue assortment included former 'video nasty' Delirium — the deranged effort from first-time filmmaker Peter Maris — retitled as Psycho Puppet, and Lucio Fulci's ultra-violent The Naples Connection, re-christened as The Smuggler.

Genetic Contact has now been released on DVD (back with its original title of Anna to the Infinite Power) by the relatively new Seattle, Washington based cult label, Scorpio Entertainment – who specialise “in some of the most sought-after indie and studio movies”.

  

aka : Anna to the Infinite Power

cast : Dina Merrill, Martha Byrne, Mark Patton, Donna Mitchell, Jack Ryland, Loretta Devine, Jack Gilford, Gail Weed, Virginia Stevens, Marilyn Rockafellow, John Wardwell, Susan Lowden, Warren Watson, James Louis Fleming, Julie Araskog, Kent Cottingham, Marshall Wiemer, Stuart Cole, Gary Mitchell, Paul Baillargeon