Between them, director Bruno Mattei and writer Claudio Fragasso turn bad filmmaking into an act of heroism. Mattei made more than 40 films in the course of his long career, and all of them, so far as I can work out, were spectacularly awful. He spent much of the ’70s and early ’80s making ‘erotic’ films with titles like Women’s Camp 119 and Porno Holocaust before turning his attention to the horror genre. It’s possible you’ve seen one of his better-known efforts, Rats: Night Of Terror (1983), a combination of Mad Max rip-off and creature feature in which buckets of rodents are literally thrown in the faces of its luckless actors.

Fragasso ploughed a similarly rich seam of cinematic tat, writing the screenplay for Hell Of The Living Dead (also directed by Mattei, and commonly regarded as the worst zombie movie of all time), the aforementioned Rats, Women’s Prison Massacre, and Monster Dog. In 1990, Fragasso co-wrote and directed Troll 2, arguably the Citizen Kane of terrible films.

There are moments in Shocking Dark (or Terminator II, or Alienators, as it was known in Japan) that really are gasp-inducingly bad. In an almost indescribable sort of way, it doesn’t look like a tawdry remake of Aliens so much as an artefact that has somehow materialised from an alternate timeline – a 70s, Italian incarnation of Aliens dredged up from a terrible dimension where James Cameron never existed.

It’s also extremely funny. Most Alien clones were nastier, more violent and sordid than the film they sought to emulate. Shocking Dark doesn’t appear to be able to afford the gore effects, so it’s no more claret-spattered than your average episode of Doctor Who. It attempts to remake the amorphous, sticky nest from Aliens with little more than a can of that fake cobweb stuff you used to see sprayed around fake castles in old Hammer Horror films. The mutant creature costumes its stunt actors wear appear to be so cumbersome that they can barely move. When a soldier shoots one of the monsters, we’re often treated to the same effects shot of white, shaving-foam like goo emerging from a jagged head wound.