Customer Reviews

Xtro 2 [VHS]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I first saw Xtro 2:The Second Encounter when looking for my favorite actor(Nicholas Lea who plays Baines).My first impression was Aliens ripoff, but as I watched it for the first time I saw a storyline which was different from aliens and had potential but sadly was neglected by second rate director Harry Bromley Davenport. Jan-Micheal Vincent gives a decent performence as also does Nicholas Lea but that is about all it has going for it.

normally id give a film that i enjoyed so much a high star rating, but in this case i must expose it for the crime it is to movie lovers.

firstly, im a b-movie fan and this one rocked my socks off; shoddy acting, pitiful and repetitive sets, embarrasing dialogue and a 'script' to match. i found the movie a pleasant and fun rollercoaster of action- but thats in my opinion, in anyone elses i can imagine the cruel taste of $2 down the drain to be quite bitter.

bottom line, avoid unless you have a thing for terrible (and easily mockable) films. sadly id have to say this is one of my favorites.

if you DO stumble upon this film keep an eye out on the 'jedburg' actor, that guys going places ;)

I was tricked into watching this movie. I had not seen the original Xtro. I was not familiar with the dircector. I read only the skimpy SCI-FI description of the movie in the yahoo tv online schedule which read, in total: "The sole survivor of a parallel-world trip joins the woman in charge of another one gone wrong." Endquote! I am a fan of alternate world stories, having had one published. In view of all of the above, I sat down before my 32" tv, put the taped movie into the vcr, and prepared to watch a decent action movie -- I thought. I saw Jan-Michael Vincent in a couple of other movies since his character in "airwolf" and I think he should have quit after the series ended. I found myself fast-forwarding much of the movie wanting to get it over with. I only wanted to see how it came out not what happened to make it come out. Not recommended for anyone. Review based on the vcr recording from the SCI-FI channel January 31, 2005.

XTRO 2: The Second Encounter (Harry Bromley Davenport, 1990)

There are few things on a video box that telegraph "this is a horrible movie" better than the combination of a copyright date after 1980 and the name Jan-Michael Vincent. I had hopes for this, being a sequel to one of the eighties' most brilliant and underrated horror films, but I should have known to trust the signs.

Harry Bromley Davenport helmed this sequel to his own XTRO (1984), teaming up once again with scriptwriter Robert Smith, who did such a fantastic job on the original. The similarity between the two films, however, ends there. Three more writers were brought in, two first-timers and a second-timer, and if Smith created a script even a tenth as good as the one for the previous XTRO, it was obliterated in rewrite.

The first part of the tagline says it all: "Part alien. Part predator." And rather than the grisly, atmospheric pissed-off-E.T. Of the first film, we get a substandard-action-flick pissed-off Alien. But someone forgot to tell the writers that the alien in Alien was already pissed off, and that Alien was a good horror flick, not a treacly, syrupy sweet family film that begged for an extreme gore treatment.

Do I even need to review the plot, what there is of it? The heads of a secret government project, NEXUS, are Dr. Alex Summerfield (Paul Koslo, whose career bottomed out in Heaven's Gate) and Dr. Julie Casserly (Tara Buckman, one of Cannoball Run's "Lamborghini Babes"), are trying to create a portal to another dimension. They get three people through, of whom only one returns alive-- a woman. You know what's coming next, though the new film jettisons the infamous birth scene of XTRO and replaces it with an Alien-like chest burster, adding a few other tricks that had no place in the original film. The creature then pursues everyone left in the facility, including Dr. Ron Shepherd (the infamous Mr. Vincent), head of a previous NEXUS installation who'd destroyed the facility rather than let one of these beasts loose upon the world. Trapped with them are The Sidekick and The Army Men, useless two-dimensional shells of characters who exist to die, and The Beautiful Doctor Who's Attracted to a Character, ditto. (Both The Beautiful Doctor etc., played by Rachel Hayward, and one of the Army Men, played by a young Nicholas Lea-- not coincidentally, the only two in the film who have a shred of acting ability-- later turned up in Chris Carter TV series-- Harsh Realm and The X-Files, respectively.) So you have an alien and some human lunch. You know what's going to happen for the rest of the movie.

XTRO 2 is an insult. Why Davenport had anything to do with it is beyond me; both he and Smith should have disowned the film before its release. Horror film fans, especially those who have discovered the brilliance of the original film, should be cautioned to stay far, far away from this dog. (zero)

I've never seen the first X-Tro movie, but I couldn't find any reference to it in this story. The plot concerns an ultra-secret government project buried under ground. The project is designed to perfect inter-dimensional teleportation using super-computers and superconductive coils. First to go through the process is a team of camera-equipped explorers. When the camera sends back footage across the iso-dimensional divide, we see our intrepid band walking across an otherworldly windswept desert - lifeless....except for a mysterious hemispherical something on the horizon. Nearing the structure, the group begins to black out, cutting off contact with Earth. Unwisely, the project remote-recalls one of the team members, but she hasn't come back alone. Faster than you can say "and Jonathan Hurt, as 'Kane'", the unlucky survivor fatally bears an alien that's hideous and otherworldly (but worldly enough to head for the first ventilator shaft it can find). After bringing in a special-ops team, and Jan Michael Vincent, the project computer seals off the project - trapping our heroes with the beast. The rest of the movie has our heroes navigating the dark labyrinth of the project's interiors, dodging aliens both insidiously small and hideously huge. ... The flick has some nice touches which hint that somebody imaginative was around (especially the idea that all we ever see of the alien world is through the vid-cam; that was probably so they could do it in miniature rather than having to build a set, but the practicality also highlights what horror movies are about - the picture sent back is impossible to satisfactorily explain, much as true horror must be beyond our powers of understanding). Nevertheless, the flick never comes close to matching that promise. ...

By the numbers Alien clone with very bad acting added into the mix.
If I was Fox, I'd sue, not for ripping the alien film off but for giving it a bad name.
This film stinks.

Xtro 2 is not a sequel to the clever, early 80s British horror film, Xtro, but more of a sci-fi oriented action flick that rips off Alien. Government project involving parallel universes goes haywire when hostile beast is brought back and terrorizes the facility. Doesn't sound terribly original and it isn't. Director Harry Bromley-Davenport seems to hate this film just about as much as everyone else. Davenport had the rights to the "Xtro" name, so he could slap in on anything. He could make a film about the Boston Tea Party and call it Xtro if he wanted to. Some Canadians got this "sequel" going and Davenport was pretty much just a hired on director along for the ride and used for the Xtro name. Davenport explains in the bonus features on the first Xtro disc that he really had little to do with this film, even as the director. He pretty much just did it for a paycheck and admits that the film is crap. Jan Michael Vincent apparently was a bit of a problem considering he cared nothing for the project at all. He didn't read the script or know what was happening in the story, didn't memorize his lines, so his lines had to be said to him by Davenport, and Vincent would simply repeat them back to him. That's how all of Vincent's lines were done! Man, this acting thing is a breeze, I'm in the wrong profession. People have remarked upon how Vincent looks drunk the whole film, and I have to agree. He's really stumbling through it, and it actually gives the movie an odd kind of entertainment value to watch the Jan Michael Vincent train wreck in action..
Xtro 2 isn't all that dreadful. Even though it didn't have a single original bone in it's body, and was made by a bunch of schmucks, it was a rather painless hour and a half in front of the tv.

What else can I say about this movie? This... um... sequel (?) to a previous alien encounter film called Xtro is not only a blatant rip off of other, more popular Sci-Fi movies but it does them in the worst way possible. The script is a nightmare, the special effects are weak, the acting is weaker, and the whole idea just shouldn't have been done to begin with. Xtro II: The Second Encounter has nothing new (or even decent) to offer to science fiction or horror fans.

Have you seen the original Xtro? Don't worry if you haven't because this "sequel" has absolutely nothing to do with it. Not a single connection is made between the two movies other than an alien killer is on the loose. I guess director Harry Davenport just likes to name his alien invader movies Xtro no matter how unrelated they are. The worse thing about this is the movie makes references to significant stuff that happened in the past. To a casual viewer they might think it's the previous movie when in fact it's stuff that's not from any previous movie. The references are so ominous and evasive that you can't help but wonder what the heck they are talking about.

This is the sort of thing that plagues the script from beginning to end. The plot is vague and incoherent along with the fact some really dumb (and thankfully minor) plot twists are also splattered along the story. Essentially the movie moves from an Alien knock off plot with characters getting picked off one by one (and you can see it's coming a mile away) to an Aliens (the movie) knock off with more people getting picked off (again making you feel psychic for knowing who gets it and when). Any attempt to build suspense or fear fails miserably. The dialog is utter tripe, with lame one-liners and wannabe catch phrases all over the place. The more embarrassing being when they start doing "tech talk", which reminded me of Spaced Invaders. Only with Spaced Invaders they meant to make it sound silly.

Character development? You can forget that. The characters are written one-dimensional and the acting doesn't get much better. The only character with even a hint of decent dialog is Zunoski, but it's not enough to endorse this film. All of the acting is pretty lame with just a little exception to Jano Frandsen, who in the final 20 minutes of the movie finally shows some character development. Actually there is probably ten minutes in this movie where I did start feeling interested in it and it's during this Frandsen moment. But again it's not enough to give this movie any kudos. Special effects aren't special at all. As a matter of fact it feels more like an 80's movie. That's probably due to a small budget. I will give props on the design of the alien monster, even if how it came to be, why it's killing everyone, and how the characters handle it give more than enough to ruin what little the movie has going for it.

Xtro II is a mistake. My only guess on why they made it was because they thought they could make money with just clichés and no well-developed story. I can only recommend this to Mystery Science Theater 3000 as they are the only ones who could make something of this picture. I don't recommend this anybody or anything else. If you seen the first two Alien movies you have already seen tons more than what this film can possibly offer.

I think you could make a drinking game of attempting to match scenes in this movie to Alien and Aliens. Fronm the grainy footage of a derelict spacecraft and people asking "what is that?" to the chest burster scene, to the person peering through a ceiling tiles, to the marine that goes crazy, to the large gun attached to the waist, the list goes on and on. It's almost worth watching to see how many "matches" you can make.

I first saw this movie with my grandparents. My grandparents did not like it. But while I loved it. The birth kept me up all night. But the movie rocked. all for now.