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Xtro

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Earlier this week I watched a thoroughly disgusting movie called Slugs (1987)...and tonight I watched Xtro (1983), another sloppy charmer featuring some wildly visceral and repugnant imagery. It's not that I mind the gross out stuff so much, but too much of it does create a strain on my gag reflex...oh well, don't weep for me, Argentina, as I follow the path, regardless of mucky entrails I may stumble over and slimy gristle I may slip on, in my perpetual endeavors in acquiring true, cinematic enlightenment. Co-written and directed by Harry Bromley Davenport (Xtro II: The Second Encounter, Xtro 3: Watch the Skies), the film features Philip Sayer (Slayground), Bernice Stegers (Sky Bandits), Danny Brainin ("John and Yoko: A Love Story"), Simon Nash (Brazil), and former Bond girl Maryam d'Abo (The Living Daylights, Timelock), in her cinematic debut (hers and her `twins').

As this English production begins we see a cottage in the countryside, and a man playing with his son in the yard. Shortly after the mother leaves, the skies turn dark, the wind picks up, strange lights appear overhead, and poof! the man is gone...fast forward three years...the boy, named Tony (Nash), who lives in the city with his mother Rachel (Stegers) and her boyfriend Joe (Brainin), still has nightmares about the event, one which no one believes happens, as the thought is his father, Sam (Sayer), just picked up and left, never to return. Until now. Once again some strange lights cruise the night, depositing something in the area where Sam disappears so long ago...something nasty. The creature finds an unwilling participate in a bizarre mating ritual (an extraterrestrial shagfest), which results in one of the more repulsive scenes in the movie as Sam makes his grand entrance (if you've seen the movie, you know what I mean). Sam then `arranges' a ride to the city for an awkward reunion of sorts with his family, bearing a gift for his son. Tensions rise as Rachael doesn't know what to make of her supposedly amnesiac husband, and Joe distrusts him completely, thinking his intentions are to try and pick up where he left off. Also, it seems Sam's picked up some strange habits since his return, like eating reptile eggs and purposely breathing gaseous vapors, along with giving his son a hickey you wouldn't believe...and then the killings start...a throat slash here, a bayoneting there...and what's the deal with the clown dwarf with the rubber hammer, seriously? And let's not forget about Analise (d'Abo), the live-in housekeeper...I don't think her job description included being the `eggbearer'. If I seem obtuse in my descriptions, it's intentional as to say much more would be to give away all the depraved, nasty little treats in store for those who choose to watch...

First of all, for much of the film I though Maryam d'Abo's character was named `Analease', like the lubricant, as that's exactly how it sounded whenever someone said it (her character's actual name is `Analise'). While watching Xtro, the often bloody, surreal, and often absurd and warped imagery reminded me of something you might see in a David Cronenburg (Shivers, Rabid, Videodrome) film, the difference being where Cronenburg's movies tend to present underlying, thematic assessments of modern beliefs, Harry Bromley Davenport offers up none of that, but rather a superficial mixing of curious sci-fi and grotesque horror with no ulterior motive other than to entertain. There is a structure within the story, but it's fairly fractured, even more so as the film progresses. Despite this, things did work themselves out (for the most part), and after the film ended a good deal of it made sense, so I would suggest, if you are going to watch this feature, to just sit back for the ride and not focus too much on that which will never be understandable (who says everything has to make sense in a film anyway?). The creepiest part of the movie for me was what happened to Maryam d'Abo's character, and her eventual role within the context of the story...a truly revolting fate, if you really think about it. One of the things that really impressed me was the special effects, and their level of sophistication...no computer generated images here. The humanoid grasshopper, the birthing scene, the implantation mechanism, the pulsating larva sacs, the creature near the end, all done very well and quite effective, in grotesque fashion. I thought all the actors did pretty well, but I can't help wondering now what their thoughts were at the time they were making this movie, given its overall mondo weirdo nature. Maryam d'Abo didn't have much of a part, but she's probably the most memorable particularly due to her willingness to appear nekkid...homina homina...all in all a creepy, low budget, decent production values film that wallows around in its own vulgarity, worth seeing if only to serve as a reminder that not all aliens eat Reese's Pieces and heal ouchies with glowing appendages. If you have delicate sensibilities and a weak stomach, best stay away from this one.

The picture presentation on this DVD is in anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1), and looks decent enough, but it could have used a little cleaning up. There are some noticeable elements on the picture, but nothing that stands out as major defects. The Dolby Digital mono audio track comes though nicely, and I have no complaints. There are some good extras, or `Xtras' (Get it? Stop it, you're killing me...), including two alternate endings, an `Xtra' scene (sans audio), a featurette titled `Xtro Exposed' (17:21), which is a great interview with the director who's a really funny guy, a theatrical trailer, and an Xtro gallery. The film was followed by two sequels, Xtro II: The Second Encounter (1990) and Xtro 3: Watch the Skies (1995), neither of which has much of anything to do with the original (I heard the second one, featuring Jan-Michael Vincent, is particularly craptastic).

Cookieman108

If I learned anything from this film it's that you should never let an alien use your telephone, because it will cause it to get all hot n' melty...

Super gory, nudity, bizarre surreal script, this movie really feels like a drug trip. Although it was made in 1983, it feels more like one of those weird 70s horror flix. Definitely a must see for fans of schlock. But beware the third movie, which is also on DVD. It's awful.

The film gets a 1:85:1 transfer, enhanced for widescreen TVs. The image is pretty sharp and clear. The print wasn't cleaned up at all, and there is a lot of specks, dust and hairs visible. The audio seems to be mono, but it is sharp and clear.

The 2 alternate endings are very short, one is nearly identical to the original, the other is a good alternate take, and the one deleted scene is only 35 seconds long. You also get an interview with the director and still shots of behind the scenes.

Now let's just hope xtro 2 makes it to DVD.

This is one of those movies (like the bargain-basement "Carnival of Souls" or the Japanese "Attack of the Mushroom People") which critics and audiences immediately write off, and yet the images and atmosphere seem to creep up in your psyche and stick with you for years. The concept: Daddy disappears, later returns a changed man, and everything falls apart. Sort of a wacky reinterpretation of the Judeo-Christian apocalypse, with Christ's return signalling the end of everything we know. The special effects are superb on this film, as evidenced in the rebirthing scene, but it is the unseen and implied which makes this film truly horrifying (what WAS that creature they ran into?). Philip Sayer is perfect as the quiet, transformed "father" of all the horror, and his performance is a large part of why the film is so disturbing. Maryam D'Abo adds little to the piece aside from her value as a sexual object (which she ultimately becomes in the film, in a horrific way). This film confounds our expectations, which all horror films should seek to do. Of course it is low-budget and low-brow, but that doesn't detract from its ability to frighten its audience. Years after I first saw it, this film still has the power to give me the creeps.

In the "It followed me home, Mom---can I keep it" camp of storytelling comes XTRO, a little tale of intergalactic parenting that goes to show the lengths some guys will go to to get out of paying child support.

"Xtro" proves that even if you're the ultimate in deadbeat Dads---one who traded the basic patriarchal duties to go intergalactic bar-hopping for a few years with alien abductors---you can always go Home again.

Only: Home might not be exactly what it was. And you might not be exactly the same Dad you were to begin with. And when you get done, Home is going to *definitely* have gone through some radical remodelling.

Call it Home Improvement, E.T.-style.

That's pretty much the raw meat and bloody viscera of "XTRO", a deliciously sick, gloriously gory, considerably raunchy little tale of alien invasion, glistening, silky little alien eggs, bloodsucking parasites, leering circus dwarves, coughing panthers, and one man's quest to secure visiting rights to his estranged son, and the Devil take the consequences!

Whatever you think of XTRO, you've got to admire Sam Phillips's (Philip Sayer)pluck in getting back together with his kid (wee little Simon Nash). For one thing, the flick's relatively sane opener---a scene of Yorkshire domestic bliss, daddy playing outside a rustic cottage with his son---is interrupted by a little fire in the sky, and poof!: XTRO serves up one nasty alien abduction, piping hot!.

Things careen from one level of insanity to another pretty much after that.

Sam, evidently, sustains something considerably more life-changing than an anal probe. Then, two years later, without even phoning home to tell his long-suffering wife "the check's in the mail", he shows up.

Well, sorta.

After a fairly complicated re-entry---you'll know what I'm talking about when I see it---Daddy Sam re-inserts himself in his estranged family's life. I mean, Hell, who can blame the Old Man: he just wants life to be like it was, back before he went on an unscheduled Extraterrestrial Magic Carpet Ride, back before Mommy got a whiny new boyfriend (who, frankly, merits instant destruction: look at it from Sam's viewpoint).

Back before Daddy was so dang seepy and goopy.

Anyway, Sam is back in the future, and before long starts working on building a real Family Nest Egg.

If you know what I mean.

Now: all sarcasm aside, "XTRO" is some pretty demented, outrageous, fairly nauseating filth. If I weren't the jaded, gore-crazed monster I am, I might even have found it fairly disturbing. Strike that: I *do* find it disturbing, especially the fate that descends on hot little Maryam D'Abo, a fate that shouldn't happen to a dog.

It's genuinely scary and creepily repulsive. Take that POV-shot of a car, headed down a dark, mist-shrouded, winding English road: what's that---is something hauling itself through the heather, crawling weakly towards the side of the road? What's that---my God, *that*, in the headlamps!

Or take the way Harry Bromley-Davenport upstages Japanese wildman Takashi Miike by about 20 years with his---umm, unexpected---alien re-entry method. And no, it doesn't involve a space capsule.

Or take the sustained, purposeful nastiness of XTRO: its relentless goopiness, its gleeful obsession with the seminal, the fluid, the fact that we human beings are an incredibly messy species, and the myriad ways in which a fiendish alien intelligence could take advantage of this to spread the spores, so to speak.

XTRO likes webbing. And things that spit. And bile, and pus, of course: and most of all slimy extrusions. Oh, and Eggs. Definitely Eggs.

Really, this should serve as warning: I can't get over just how unrelentingly disgusting XTRO is.

The extra features include an embarrassed interview with the director, Bromley-Davenport: it's evident that he felt he was meant for better things, and that he was slumming it with XTRO. Which is a pity, too: a glance at his subsequent career (from the IMDB) shows that he had it exactly backwards, and should have staked his ground deep in horror territory---if XTRO was achieved more by accident than by design, as Bromley-Davenport claims, then the man had a rare gift for horror.

At any rate, posterity has this marvellous little gem---erm, egg---to delight, repulse, confound, and horrify. It's actually scary, which can't be said about many flicks. And for those seriously deadbeat dads out there scraping bottom on excuses for not getting the child-support, it's inspirational!

Oh: and for anyone with a sensitive psyche, XTRO might very well blast your sanity.

JSG

Sam Phillips(played by Philip Sayer)is a family man with a wife ,Rachel (Bernice Stegers)and a son Tony(Simon Nash)One day he is abducted by aliens and the sct is witnessed by his son .His wife will not believe her son's story and insists he is rationalising his fathers abandonment of the family.
Then 3 years later Sam returns claiming he remembers nothing of what has happened to him in the interim.Soon his family begin to notice something odd is happening -such as his eating snake eggs ,and leaving behind a trail of horribly mutilated bodies .In the time of his abduction Sam hgas become an alien -a reptilian creature with a voracious appetite for human flesh .The object of his return is to take his son back with him to the alien planet from whence he came.

This movie bore the poster tag line "Not all aliens are friendly"in what seemed to be a refutation of the warm cuddliness of ET .The main point to make aboutthis movie Xtro is that its effects are gross and quite repellent.The gors content is high and viscera abounds .It is NOT for the delicate of stomach.The domestic scenes are poorly acted and directed and some material is just palin irrelevant -as per the telekinesis sub-plot and the scenes of toys coming to life .On the plus side you do get a very clear sense of the sheer"alien-ness"of the creature and its utter disregard for human life and its own urgent need to survive

Stir in some nudity with the violence and you get a graphic and explicit movie that when it works it works well but overall has too many dull patches to be anything more than adequate

You know how sometimes you watch a horror or sci-fi movie and you can tell the director was trying to be weird for its own sake, and somehow it just doesn't work? For whatever reason, this movie works. The basic plot is that this guy disappears, and comes back a while later and he's.........different. He also seems to want to take over other people. Sounds fairly standard. But when you have a woman give birth to a fully-formed man, Maryam D'abo getting turned into a cocoon, and a strange sequence involving clowns, you roam off the normal path. The acting is good, and not just in the 'good-for-a-B-movie' way, and this probably helps things. Plus, while the plot isn't much to speak of, the scenes manage to keep you interested anyway. This can either be enjoyed as is, or in a 'so-weird-it's-good' way. Definitely worth getting, although for some reason, the sequels (in name only, as no characters or actors return) aren't really all that good or memorable. So just stick with this one.

I saw this film at the cinema when it first came out and there are some sequences that have stuck in my mind ever since. This flick is a whole lotta fun when you're not in the mood for a serious drama or heavy type of film. For a low budget job, it has very good acting and some cool sfx, and whilst it's obvious where it's inspirations come from, it really does'nt matter, at least not for me. (and I like serious sci-fi too!) It does have some very creepy moments and seriously stomach-churning gore, but it's just so weird you can't look away. Recommended for lovers of good bad B movies and thoroughly deserved of it's cult status.

One could never accuse Xtro of being a copy of any other film as the whole thing looks like it was thrown together and made up as they went along.
A man taken by aliens returns for his son and from the moment it starts xtro is a wild, wild trip.
Made on a very limited budget this film is very good because you can add to or take from it what you will, it can mean anything you want it to mean with the ending only making matters more confusing by giving us a deeper void to ponder.
I guess you could call Xtro a sci-fi art film.
I love it.

"Xtro" is a cautionary tale about what may happen if Daddy was kidnapped by aliens and then three years later........he returns... It's how Dad returns that has to be one of the most outrageous, slimiest, and twistedly funny scenes I can recall, at this moment, ever seeing.......More on that later.

Mom and Dad, Rachel and Sam with their young son Tony are staying at their cottage in the countryside outside of London. Rachel leaves to do some errands and father and son are playing fetch with the family pet. The sky blackens, winds reach hurricane force and a shaft of light envelops Dad and he vanishes.

Three years later Rachel and Tony are living in their apartment in London along with Analise, a French Au Pair and Rachels new boyfriend, Joe.

Rather than detail the whole story, their are some scenes that should be explored including Dad's outrageous return to Mother Earth.

A small space vessal crashes in the countryside and a creature resembling a combination of a piranha, reptile and a grasshopper, slithers and hops towards the cottage once occupied by the family, taking a brief timeout to kill a nosy motorist and his girlfriend.

A young woman now residing at the cottage is attacked and knocked unconscious by the pir-rep-hopper creature and it then prceeds to mouth-rape her.

Now for the outrageous scene---when the girl wakes up she finds herself 9 months pregnant with a baby bump the size of an over-sized beach ball and something is trying to claw its way out. She falls to a sitting position on the floor, wracked with contraction pain and as her legs spread, out slides Father Sam all six feet of him, covered in slime and after-birth as he savagely chomps down and severs the umbilical cord.

Father and son now reunited, the son is horrified to witness his father greedily slurping down the contents of the eggs from Tonys pet snake. Tony runs away but Dad finds him and convinces Tony that he has changed and needed the snake eggs. Sam then bites down on Tonys shoulder and transfuses some of his alien DNA into him.

Tony starts to turn alien and with the help of a midget clown with a rubber hammer, AnaLise is knocked unconscious and Tony tranfuses her which turns her into a human egg sac and the eggs bright as Easter eggs slide down a chute fron inside to outside her body.

Father and son now completely morphed into pir-rep-hopper creatures prepare to return to whence pir-rep-hopper creatures come from but first alien dad kills his wifes new boyfriend. Apparently even ugly, evil aliens get jealous.

"Xtro" is one of my guilty pleasures from the 80's and one of the film's assets is, at 83 minutes it plays like half that time. And there are no "filler" scenes to pad the running time-every scene speeds to the next one. The movie may be outlandish, outrageous, gory and unbelievable but hey, that's its charm and although I remember the movie, Father's rebirth scene I will never forget.

I will never forget this film. I saw this film at the age of thirteen and the re-birth scene was extremely disturbing to my mind. It changes my sinless mind for ever like Adan and Eve when they feel the impact of the original sin. I couldn't sleep that terrible night. The re-birth scene was like a brainstorm in my mind and I feel the most strange situation of mind damage in all my life. Now, I want to see it again but at the same time I feel scared. Its the most strange alien classic, but that's why you would never forget it. Please, excuse if there is some incorrect word because I am a latin american from Puerto Rico.