X: The Unknown (1956)

 

Director: Leslie Norman (and Joseph Losey)

Screenplay: Jimmy Sangster

Cast: Dean Jagger as Dr. Adam Royston; Edward Chapman as John Elliott; Leo McKern as Insp. 'Mac' McGill; Anthony Newley as LCpl. 'Spider' Webb; Jameson Clark as Jack Harding; William Lucas as Peter Elliott; Peter Hammond as Lt. Bannerman

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #208

 

An early Hammer film, a tale of a strange radioactive entity that has spring up from a fissure in the Scottish countryside, the first thing that came to mind pronounced is how safety measures when handling radioactive material has become more severe over the decades after. Back here, almost an entirely different reality of Britain in appearance and atmosphere, it was perfectly fine to just have a lead box for radioactive metals and a see through pane to stand the other side of to experiment on it, not even full body suits.

In seriousness though, whilst that was a perturbing aspect of the film, it is significant that when the original Godzilla was made by Toho in Japan in 1954, and the Americanized version only was made in 1956, there was a film here which is blatant as a metaphor for the dangers of using radioactive energy and substances without realising their danger. Of note, adding to this, is knowing this was meant to be a sequel returning to writer Nigel Kneale's popular character  Professor Bernard Quatermass, following from The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), only for Kneale to prevent this¹. In hindsight, you could have easily seen this film as a Quatermass production, but instead we have scientist Dr. Adam Royston (Dean Jagger), an expert in radioactive materials who finds himself drawn into this scenario when, during military training of locating radioactive materials with a detector, a group of army soldiers are caught off-guard by a fissure in the earth to appear.

The location, rural Scotland in the Lochmouth region, does add a lot of weight to this film even if it is a traditional b-movie that involves a monstrous form, [Spoiler Warning] a radioactive and living mass of mud-likegoo which absorbs radioactive energy [Spoiler Ends]. This is all in mind that you have a violent contrast to a wholesome idyllic place of the past against then-modern science. Here people still go to Church, as in one scene, and when they need to flee their homes, they hide in said Church with the vicar making sure everyone is safe. There are cars and electric lights, but this is still as much a place, even if shot in England, of the World War II and even pre-WWII era, contrasted by Royston's workplace of vast laboratories and computers, even if he himself prefers working in his little shed with his own experiments.

And, in spite of its monster, rendered with models being engulfed in its form, especially in the early stages X does have a darker side because of its tackling of radioactivity. Anyone who is in presence of this being, shown from its perspective for its victims, suffers radioactive burns which can more than likely kill them eventually, even just being near the entity. Even a child, a young boy dared by another to enter spooky woods, which is very adult to have done at the time and still is today. And, still by today's standards, there are a few gruesome moments, especially with someone when attacked in an x-ray room of the hospital being melted to death beyond the skeleton in its presence, which is still icky to see decades later. More so, it is a surprise to see in British horror film from the late fifties such scenes, a reminder than Hammer, whilst a cultural institution in the modern day, were pushing boundaries in terms of what they could get away with, the irony of them become antiquated in the mid-seventies ironic when even this, one of their obscurer films, has such scenes. It also presents one scene, as a result, which does become haunting in context of its themes and time of creation. That the father of the child injured, who has just died before in the scene, berates Royston for his involvement in working on radioactive materials, which he takes the blame for in a universal sense. This ultimately cheesy film still taps into a real fear post-atomic bomb which can be found and adds a greater weight to it.

Ultimately it leads to a monster film finale, which could be seen as a lacksidasical one in hindsight to all this, though let us not ignore this was a horror film first, and that it manages to still have a weight with the themes it decided to tackle. With the Quatermass connection, it would have actually improved the film if Nigel Kneale was willing to play ball. Not least, because The Quatermass Xperiment itself, the Hammer adaptation, ends with a cheesy looking monster, but managed to make its themes still stand out regardless. The themes in the version of the film we did get are still strong in this form, and Dean Jagger is actually an interesting lead who could have been a Quatermass-like figure himself in more productions.

The film as well looks gorgeous in context - mostly set in the countryside, the film in monochrome as well has an evocative edge which helps greatly with the production, even making the monster more alarming than goofy as it is a literal mass which cannot be halted. (Thankfully cinematographer Gerald Gibbs, a veteran who had worked on films like No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) beforehand, would be hired for Quatermass II (1957)). The other intriguing thing to consider is that, with some of his footage surviving in the final production, this was originally a film to be helmed by Joseph Losey, which adds an additional strange touch. Losey, who would eventually be the auteur behind many idiosyncratic dramatic films in the sixties to the eighties, would get a Hammer film entirely to himself, The Damned (1963), which was also about the perils of radioactivity, and thus adds a nice little bow to cinematic history when few directors get enough shot with the same studio on similar material.

 

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1) Referenced HERE.

The Xtro Trilogy (1982/1990/1995)

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.

From https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOGZhY2I4M2MtMDlkYS00ZDEyLW
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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

From https://s3.drafthouse.com/images/made/XTRO_Still_1_758_411_81_s.jpg

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From https://cdn.cinematerial.com/p/500x/s3rr50tt/xtro-ii-the-second-
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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

From http://rarefilm.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/
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From http://www.fantafilm.net/Schede/1991/95-35b.jpg

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

From https://monsterhuntermoviereviews.com/
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