As franchises go, the Xtro
trilogy is, shall we say, a head scratcher, where the first one is justifiably
a cult film whilst the other two are curiosities of what horror sequels can
wander off into unexpectedly. The strange thing is that the original Xtro is a truly bizarre experience,
where the director despite it being the best film of the three holds it as a
mess. The reason why for these two
statements, and what the sequels are which don't get as frequently mentioned in
the slightest, are the subject of this article.
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Xtro (1982)
Director: Harry Bromley Davenport
Screenplay: Harry Bromley
Davenport; Michel Perry; Iain Cassie; Robert Smith
Cast: Philip Sayer as Sam
Phillips; Bernice Stegers as Rachel Phillips; Danny Brainin as Joe Daniels;
Maryam d'Abo as Analise Mercier; Simon Nash as Tony Phillips
The first Xtro film is a peculiar creation onscreen and behind the camera, in
which you can effectively boil it down to a domestic drama about divorce and
how it can leave very destructive emotional wounds for everyone, explicitly
about a father returning back to his old family. The difference here is that the
father was abducted by aliens and returns to his wife, son and her new love
having been turned into an alien creature, one still with the intention of
communicating to his son and taking him back.
The film touches on a premise
where you can uncover so many layers, when upon returning, he gives his son
powers and all hell breaks loose. It was a New
Line Pictures production before the company was even a major player,
produced before the Nightmare on Elm
Street series made them financially well off. Shot in England, it has an
entirely different air, that of a working class domestic drama if invaded by
the hyper prosthetic heavy grotesque horror that came from the United States. Horror
from the British at the time, whilst I won't damn it all, could have a tendency
to be cheesy or just sleazy, usually not the hypersurreal pop bombast that Xtro provides, a film that was
notorious for a woman giving birth to a grown man, which is would be enough to
keep the production in horror's twisted history but has a lot more going on
beyond that.
The drama is compelling, a lot
emphasised on the fact the son has been obsessed with his absentee father all
these years to the chagrin of the step father to be, a photographer who is
sympathetic as feeling like the third wheel as his lover also has affection for
her absent husband. With an additional character in terms of a nanny, played by
Maryam d'Abo from For Your Eyes Only
(1981), one of the best of the James
Bond films from that era, it plays with enough weight and gains a lot more
depth from the strangest that enfolds. Where Xtro gets weird, it does so from the beginning onwards, which is
great for this. It was a film many, like myself, presumed was on the Video
Nasties list when in fact it was just a film with notoriety that got lumped
into the moral panic. It's strange to think this is suitable for fifteen year
olds to watch nowadays when it's still a dark, emotionally wrought and perverse
creature, managing to escalate even after the grown man being birth is
grotesque and given away in the prologue of the main narrative.
Weird sexual undercurrents are
everywhere - in the sexy French nanny who sneaks her boyfriend into the house, the
wife still being in love with absentee husband, even how the powers being
passed from father to son involves an uncomfortably incestuous scene of neck
sucking with a giant rubber nipple lump being created. And then someone lost
their minds and introduced random material into the world as, with super
powers, the son turning his toys into living creatures. Thus he have a clown
played by a dwarf actor to help him, a child's childish spite curdled into evil
as he starts a project to turn his apartment into an all-white death-trap of
body horror, living plastic soldiers and a real fucking panther of all things.
And the swearing in that last sentence is justified, to apologise for my
French, because New Line Pictures
founder Robert Shaye had access to
one and demanded an actual wild animal be included in the film somehow even if
it didn't make sense to, which just exemplifies how bugnuts insane Xtro actually becomes.
It is for once a film where
studio tampering is actually adding greater power to a film, as if the case
when that aforementioned soldier appears, a doll (like the Action Men of my
youth) that is an actor in costume mechanically moving along like a doll,
terrorising a neighbour in a scene which becomes more disturbing because this
willingness to stretch the limits of the production and take a risk. Certainly
in the entire trilogy this is the best made and the most imaginative. There is
a style here, the down-to-earth British drama a very unique place for this type
of horror film to exist, between the urban environments and woodland even if
you still have the time's dated aesthetics, particularly the step father's own
pad which is white and has a parrot of all things. Davenport himself also created the score, which he doesn't look
highly upon at all, but is nonetheless incredibly evocative which works for the
limitations as a synthesiser score for a low budget film he had issues with.
Altogether there's a lot to admire, and to see this film finally is with weight
is much more rewarding when I had originally learnt of it as a young teenager
as merely a lurid sci-fi horror film. Learning its this surreal, complex oddity
is something to behold....
Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Psychodrama/Random/Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low
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Xtro II: The Second
Encounter (1990)
Director: Harry Bromley Davenport
Screenplay: John A. Curtis,
Stephen Lister, Robert Smith and Edward Kovach
Cast: Jan-Michael Vincent as Dr.
Ron Shepherd; Paul Koslo as Dr. Alex Summerfield; Tara Buckman as Dr. Julie
Casserly; Jano Frandsen as McShane; Nicholas Lea as Baines; W.F. Wadden as Jedburg;
Rolf Reynolds as Zunoski; Nic Amoroso as Mancini; Bob Wilde as Secretary
Kenmore; Rachel Hayward as Dr. Myers
...so how on Earth did the sequel
turn out as blandly as it did? Davenport
had the rights to the name even if none of the original source story, which
isn't necessarily the answer to my question. This is an issue with horror
sequels where the reality already created can be distorted, where the extra
terrestrials in this film are an entirely different creature in another
context, but that this is mainly a rip-off of the 1979 film Alien is where the problem lays. Whilst
it's a seminal film, Ridley Scott's
picture has a lot to answer for in accidentally leading, alongside James Cameron's Aliens (1986), to a lot of rip offs which told the story exactly
and were boring. I mean, least the Italian film Alien 2: On Earth (1980) had the decency to be entertaining, as
others have been, but there are probably five to one good one which are bad,
and jeez Xtro II is evidence to the
dangers of creating a huge hit that other people just want to recreate over and
over again without adding invention to it. Even if Davenport, in a 2005 interview called Xtro Xposed, rags on star Jan-Michael
Vincent as being unprofessional and not helping the production, this is as
bland as you could ever get without anything being really entertaining about
it.
Trapped within a secret
underground lab that deals with extra dimensional time travel, the plot even
down to the chest bursting scene is absolutely Alien re-imagined and quite boringly so. Entirely shot in an
industrial sound set, it even looks so entirely different from the original in
a negative way, on an anaemic level in terms of even how the lighting and
cameras used has left something ineffable lost.
Its sin is how dull it ultimately
is. It's a curious piece on premise then execution, Jan-Michael Vincent in a time after his brief moment in the sun for
the TV series Air Wolf (1986-1987),
and his seventies film career, looking off his game, made worse knowing his
life was going to spiral further into alcoholism and tragedy. Again, Davenport thought, alongside with
sadness for him, he was an complete obstruction to the shoot, but not many on
the film are really pulling anything out of interest, female lead Tara Buckman's most charismatic trait
craving cigarettes and wasting them soon after, little else to go from. You
thankfully get a little levity from the hired mercenaries that appear even if
most of their humour is cheesy and flat, be it making dumb one liners and E.T.
references. One of them, a New Age member who is a vegetarian, believes in
reincarnation and is happy go lucky to the point I actually liked him in a cast
of little, is a godsend for the entire film, the MVT and thankfully a character
who lasts a long time throughout.
Its the worst position to be in
when the film can barely muster a detailed review as it'll just be a plot descriptor
about events like the perils of climbing up a long and hot elevator shaft and
rubber giant alien attacks, not help that set mostly dark in the end, as the facility
is closed for quarantining by the computer with a nuclear time limit at hand, it's
not a visibly pleasing film even in the low budget kitsch way. And that's the
peril with horror sequels; even though I have developed an obsession with their
odd tangents that can redeem their major problems, something I'll get into with
Xtro III, when they are remotely
middling and little sticks out, they're an agony to sit through. Even the
masochist in me must accept how bland Xtro
II, as this is unfortunately the kind of tone that is common in horror in
general as a genre, frankly all cinema.
Abstract Spectrum: None
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
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Xtro III: Watch the Skies (1995)
Director: Harry Bromley Davenport
Screenplay: Daryl Haney
Cast: Sal Landi as Lieutenant
Martin Kirn; Andrew Divoff as Captain Fetterman; Karen Moncrieff as J. G.
Watkins; David M. Parker as Corporal Dermot Reilly; Jim Hanks as Private
Friedman; Andrea Lauren Herz as Private Banta; Daryl Haney as Private
Hendricks; Nigel Gibbs as Smythe; Robert Culp as Major Guardino
This problem of middling quality
is still felt with Xtro III, but
immediately there's a humour felt when, recreated with what was available for a
mid-nineties straight to video production (fake scratches and all), the
beginning is a parody of a fifties news reel. It even begins with a look at a
new blonde bombshell film star at a swimming pool before setting up the story,
of a UFO having crashed on Earth and being covered up by the American
government, even if it means making a boy who recorded it on camera apologise
for making it up to the entire country. This is one of the many little details
which make any moments of predictable blandness in Xtro III redeemed considerably.
The film gets eccentric at
points, set around a motley crew of mercenaries led by Sal Landi, looking like a relative of wrestling promoter Vince McMahon Jr., sent to a secret
island to dispose of old explosives which is actually a hidden lab built around
where that UFO landed. The surviving scientist is a Robinson Crusoe-like eccentric, the lab test rabbits have
multiplied over decades and are inexplicably everywhere, and the film even has
a character who is basically is Tonya
Harding, infamously a talented ice skater who was in a scandal for supposedly
having a rival's legs broken, if (in some convoluted movie law) sent into
military service and becoming Private Vasquez from Aliens (1986).
Now, frankly, Xtro III is still a generic sci-fi
action horror film which now indebted to Predator
(1987) as, whilst significantly shorter in stature, these aliens also have
(digitally rendered) cloaking ability. That's a factor which cannot be ignored,
especially as the original Xtro was
not a mainstream horror film but a true one-off oddity already, and my
vicarious pleasures of the mutating pool of sequel filmmaking can only stretch
so far until even I got sick of the generic plot with a figure, with evil
villain moustache, trying to cover the conspiracy up by having everyone killed.
Thankfully even here, weird details helped, like fake Halloween decoration
spider web being made legitimately dangerous just for the idea that, if your
actors stay still within it unable to ever get out of it again, it's more a
problem especially when the entire woodland on the island is coated in it.
Certainly having it shot on an island, with some production value again in
aerial shots, giant explosions, and even hiring of a freight ship and
helicopters, makes a great deal of
improvement with a varied world with day and night scenes.
Also the aliens themselves become
interesting again, the stereotypical little grey men made more disturbing
between spitting out the cobwebs of doom, or using their extending tongues, to
their behaviour of torturing the humans they catch in pure sadism. Or should
that be vengeance as, in a major plot spoiler, its arguably a revenge vigilante
film from the alien's perspective as, landing on Earth expecting a warm
welcome, they were captured with the pregnant female was killed and
experimented on, which naturally left the survivors with a murder rage whenever
humans appear. It's a nice touch to bring back, even in a generic action sci-fi
tone, a bit of personality again like the original Xtro, mainly that human beings for all our virtues can also be
nasty little shits at the best of times, made evident as the film plays to a
very dark humour with the ending when everything is covered up by the government
even when the film returns back to the mainland.
I can't help but see The X-Files, which started in 1993,
having a little influence here, when alien conspiracy theories and the distress
of the US government became more common in culture in general, and conspiracy
theories could lead to these playful genre films than leading to people taking
guns into a pizzeria. It is of course odd that this is an Xtro sequel - none of the films are consistent to each other unless
the aliens in each are viewed as different species - and whilst you could view
it like an anthology mentality of a different story each time, the fact Davenport eventually made action horror
films with more emphasis on action is really perplexing considering the first.
There are no more films after
this, though he has talked of making Xtro
4 in the 2010s, the original film a cult hit by itself. The curious world
of the horror franchise is one which can sadly, especially in the current day,
lead to a lot of bland sequels, and a lot which cannot really defended as the
best in cinema. But with an open mind, however, its one of the most fascinating
areas in cinema as a form in which mutation, tangents and unpredictability
especially when they're meant to follow each other as an apparent series leads
to disharmonic results. The Xtro
trilogy isn't one of the strongest, mainly due to Xtro II being so bloody boring, but the motley trio are fascinating
and the original 1982 film is the one everyone
reading this has to look into if they haven't seen it before.
Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
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great piece!
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