Ah, Xtro. One of those drug trips I took as a teen just by watching cable. I miss the 80s, when the shit that happened in a movie could make absolutely no sense yet bombard my young mind, heart, soul, and nerves with so much freaky shit that I was yanked a few steps farther away from God and closer to sanity. I’m also glad I was a kid when the first movie was released and not a decade later, when the 90s got a hold of the Xtro name for two sequels and did the one thing the 90s was good at doing—elevating the 80s even higher on its pedestal.
XTRO (1982)
While E.T. was busy selling Reese’s Pieces and playfully fingering kids, Xtro was showing us how to be a real alien, eating snake eggs and orally impregnating women with adult embryos.
A young boy’s nightmare shows us his memory of the day his father was abducted by an alien spaceship in a burst of light while they were playing in the yard of their vacation house.
It’s several years later, and his mother has a new man, the boy is all messed in the head, and no one believes what he saw that day. They think he made that story up to explain away his father just walking out on them.
Meanwhile, there’s a fiery crash in the woods and the film wastes no time with the money shot. A couple driving down an isolated road almost hits this hideous creature…and gets out to check on it. Bye bye couple.
The creature then heads over to some woman’s house for that whole oral fuck session, which turns into a nasty birth moments later!
Soon after, guess who shows up at school to pick up the young boy? His dad! And mom brings him home to meet her new man. Awkward!
If you think the new living arrangements are weird, the son sees dad doing that snake egg eating trick and just buys the whole, “I’m ‘different’ now” excuse.
The son also suddenly has a circus friend appear in his room, his toys start coming to life and killing people, a black panther materializes out of nowhere, people end up in cocoons, and the boy even sucks some female tummy. WTF?
All this while mom and dad run off to the cabin where dad was abducted to help spark his memory, and to have sex. So what does mom’s new man do? He brings the son with him to catch them in the act. He fell right into Xtro’s trap.
XTRO II: THE SECOND ENCOUNTER (1990)
I guess director Harry Bromley Davenport needed the money 8 years after making his masterpiece, so he took full advantage of it being the 90s and slapped the Xtro name on a shitty movie.
He even cast has-been Jan-Michael Vincent as the “lead.” You know a dude is a has-been when he’s the star of an underground complex alien action movie, but instead of being the hunky hero that takes off his shirt and runs around the facility shooting the creature, he just sits safely in a room for the whole movie talking about the creature.
Pretending there was no movie in 1982, this film is about a secret science lab that opens a dimension that lets an alien in.
Guys run around the halls shooting at it with their big military guns as a military soundtrack plays endlessly.
Cool creature. Some cute guys.
Terrible straight-to-VHS 90s movie.
“Terrible straight-to-VHS 90s movie.” That shit should be included in Autofill.
XTRO 3: WATCH THE SKIES (1995)
5 years later, daddy director needed to eat, so he made another Xtro. With his The Greatest American Hero earnings drying up, Robert Culp pops in to send a military team to a deserted island to diffuse some bombs or some shit like that, and Andrew Divoff starts his bid as horror icon in a minor role as their leader.
After the team settles in, a crazed man crashes their camp, and before long, they encounter classic looking aliens.
But these fuckers are mean and vicious. Their lust for blood and guts is the only thing that makes this movie worth a watch.
Not even a seeming attempt to hint at any relevance to the first film by throwing in some webbing can serve as an apology. After forever tarnishing the Xtro name by attaching Jan-Michael Vincent’s name to it, you’ll have to do a lot better than that. Maybe if you’d had Jan-Michael Vincent back for this sequel and forced him to eat real snake eggs on camera. But as it stands, Xtro 3 is really just a SyFy movie about military guys running around a tropical island fighting aliens, only with better special effects.
Xtro! What a trip.