Xtro (1982) – Review

In the slimy, drooly wake of Ridley Scott’s Alien, all manner of creepy, amorphous extraterrestrials stalked out from dark, industrial corners and alien world to try and claim their piece of the rip-off pie. However, most of them were interchangeable trash that blithely reasoned that they didn’t have to use any imagination of their own if they were going to simply use Scott’s – but one English example stands slightly apart from the others thanks to the fact that it only stole the basics and instead forged it’s own path that could charitably described as “utterly batshit” by anyone who saw it.
That movie was the oddly titled Xtro (to this day I still have no idea what it means) and while it contains all the probing tentacles, grotesque births and gooey eggs that you’d expect, in its truly bizarre attempts to have it’s own identity it also calls upon other films to give it direction, such as Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, The Omen and *checks notes* Kramer Vs. Kramer.
Let’s face it, you’ve never seen an Alien rip-off quite like this.

Three years ago, Sam Phillips was playing with his son, Tony, outside their family’s country retreat when an unearthly blinding light and a unnaturally strong wind suddenly whipped up and whisked the patriarch away to destinations unknown, but in the time since, Tony and his mother Rachel has tried to rebuild their lives. Rachel has now settled down into a relationship with American photographer Joe, but Tony is still highly resistant of accepting this relative newcomer as he still believes his father will return.
One day, Phillip does return – but not in the fashion that you’d expect. While some absent fathers may awkwardly come shuffling back with a lame apology and a present, Phillip’s return is certainly a new one on me. Dropped off by that same blinding light that took him out of the picture in the first place, a skittering, quadruped creature first murders a random couple and then attack a woman in her home and giving her the Alien impregnation treatment – but instead of a meager chestburster, the poor victim gives birth to a full grown Phillip who heads back home to his stunned, abandoned family.
Tony is overjoyed, but Rachel and Joe are somewhat suspicious of his sudden return and soon we see that this Phillip/alien/thing has designs on his son and after transferring some special powers to him after drinking his blood (!) he recruits the child into aiding him with his mission.
Before you know it, little Tony is using his newfound abilities to bring his toys to life to murder the shitty old lady who lives in the flat below and prepares the pretty French au pair for whatever creepy plan Phillip has for mankind. Can Rachel and Joe manage to untangle this awkward family affair and discover what’s really going on?

There’s many things that can endear a movie to a rabid sc-fi/horror audience. One is to simply make a great, polished, scary movie that provides great performances, magnificent special effects and a killer concept – but failing that, another sure-fire way to be noticed is to go as fucking weird as you possibly can and burn yourself into the consciousness of anyone who stumbles your way. Is Xtro a good film? Well, I’d struggle to call it a masterpiece, but thanks to the filmmaker’s off-beat talent of delivering the exact opposite of what you’d expect, this memorably strange movie certainly puts the “extra” in extra-terrestrial.
What helps is that the film actually has a solid concept lurking within its squishy core and random surrealism that deals with a father abandoning his son thanks to happening beyond his control only to return a very, very different man. You could suggest this is a metaphor for any kind of absentee father, be it simple abandonment or even a man who has gone away to war which gives this movie much more of its own identity; but the really interesting thing about Xtro is that it plays as sort of an inverse of Steven Spielberg’s E.T.. Where that film had the alien wander in and end up inadvertently healing a family rift cause by divorce, Xtro makes the alien part of the family drama and it’s something of a shame that the movie leans as far into shlock as it does as it diffuses some of the concept. However, when the shlock turns out to be this shlocky, it’s legitimately tough for this silly old gore hound to complain too loudly, because when it comes to casually slinging unhinged WTF moments at you, Xtro proves to be something of a minor gem.

The first third of the movie goes through the Ridley Scott motions, to be sure, but the way it does it is significantly weird enough to put it a step about all the also-rans. For a start, the whole woman-gives-birth-of-a-full-grown-man trick may have been sort of overused these days, but back in 1982 it must have been fucking wild and while the weird alien monster thing is obviously some skinny guy in a rubber suit doing a crab walk on all fours, it’s still a genuinely alarming moment when you see the fucker scuttle out of the night on a lonely country road.
But once Xtro gets all the familiar visual cues out the way, it’s free to go it’s own route and from here things get really weird. For a start, when he thinks no one is looking, Phillip is constantly trying to sustain his alien biology by doing really weird shit like consuming the eggs of his son’s snake or huffing gas straight from the fireplace, but this is just chump change compared to the reality altering crap his powered-up son gets up to. When he isn’t transforming a little wooden toy into a leering dwarven clown with giant (and I mean huge) red shoes to do his bidding, he’s conjuring up a human-sized Action Man to run a nagging old neighbour through with his bayonet while she cowers under her sofa. Add to this an au pair (played by Maryam d’Abo no less) who gets cocooned up to produce some pulsating eggs and her boyfriend who is chased by a toy tank with the fire power of a .44 Magnum before getting savaged by a panther and you’ve got a flick that makes up for its various shortcomings by being utterly out of its mind.

Sure the performances are fairly wooden, a lot of the movie seems fairly unconcerned about making much logical and little Tony shows all the acting range of a tin of peas, but the weapons grade peculiarity and a hilariously down beat ending means that fans of obscure, gory 80s fuckery will be well served.
Members of Fathers 4 Justice will probably feel fairly uneasy watching this, but fans of the ridiculous will no doubt love this unorthodox custody battle to the moon and beyond.

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