Xtro (1983)

At one point a... Kid somehow manifests into being (via his dad who's come back as an alien through a way I won't get into right now) a... Human-sized toy soldier that attacks an old woman who lives one floor below them and... What?On the one hand this movie looks ugly - it has the film stock of a porno - but it's also so genuinely bat***t that I almost admire it's incompetence to get to the weird. I should put this all down more for lacking logic or just a simple explanation now and then - how does the alien or aliens work, how does stuff happen, why do they need to latch on to others to suck human essence, what's with the clown and the panther and I could go on - but I never doubt that the filmmakers are going for something truly demented. It's not Humanoids from the Deep, for example, trying to be a real movie and then have a bunch of carp effects and monsters and graphic rape. As a ripoff of Alien with some ET and The Thing allusions (intentionally or not), it's a true WTF artifact of the 80s, and the effects are creatively gross and morbid.

Tony's father Sam, abducted by aliens three years earlier, returns to earth and seeks out his wife and son, but Rachel has since been living with Joe and the reunion is awkward. Joe does not trust Sam, and Rachel cannot quite decide what her feelings are for her two men. Sam is not the same as when he left, and he begins affecting Tony in frightening ways.This is one of the strangest films I have seen. And I have seen many strange films, wading as I do in horror, fantasy and cult flicks. This one is... well, hard to say. Definitely horror and definitely science fiction, but far too strange to be a straight narrative in either genre.One suspects the budget was zero, as nobody of note was involved in the picture. Bob Shaye produced for New Line, but this was before New Line had really gotten to be a big name. And yet, budget or not, we have some of the finest practical effects and creature designs you may ever see.

"When Steve grows up, he's going to watch all the movies his daddy said no to."I've told this story many times before, so I'll be brief: When I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to watch horror (or any rated-R without my parent's consent) movies, so the closest I could get would be the Fry's Food Store's horror video section and the empty video boxes. One movie that I "fantasized" about watching one day was Xtro. It would be 25 years later before I saw it.Worth the wait? Eh. I'm glad at least I can cross it off the list.I'm guessing, this 1983 (FOREIGN) movie was in response to the enormous success of 1982's E.T. especially with the movie poster's tag line "Some extra-terrestrials aren't friendly." Uhhh, I think that was proved a lot more clearly 4 years prior in that little indie Ridley Scott flick.Well, the movie might have started as an alien/sci-fi film with bright lights, bad special effects and a creature stalking innocents. Then it metamorphosis into Plot B: a family story with a lost father from Plot A and then further into Plot C when the kid gets mysterious powers and becomes a deranged killer who uses his toys as his minions. Well, most of them are toys. One's a midget with clown makeup. Finally, it comes full circle with Plot D as the "x-tro'ials" and Close Encounters, I suppose.Even though the movie's all over the place, it's actually a step above most of the horror theatrical release-of-the-week in the early 1980s. Plot C(lown) is probably the creepiest part – including a boy and his first menstrual period? – and perhaps would've made the whole movie scarier if that was the main and only focus. Of course, this would leave Plot A's birth of a man-child. Literally.It's only recommended to die-hard horror fans of the early 1980s.

This sci-fi horror film from the UK is certainly something of an oddity. It tells the tale of alien abduction but in a way no other film ever attempted to. Sure, it has some similarities to the likes of Alien and E.T. but they are really just superficial ones, as this movie takes it's influences and puts them together in a very bizarre way. Xtro is often mistaken for a video nasty, which it never was. It made one of the published lists by mistake and so the legend followed that it was one of those infamous flicks. In fairness, it wouldn't have been all that surprising if it had made the DPP's hit list seeing as several other films tagged with the video nasty brush were even less violent and gory than this one. But, don't be mistaken, Xtro is certainly not a disturbing film, it's just a bizarre one.If it wasn't for the overall weirdness this would be a pretty useless movie to be perfectly honest. It's quite poor in so many ways. But how often do you get to see a woman giving birth to a fully grown man? Or a human sized action man conducting a house invasion? Pretty much never I would say but you can here. And the weird alien creature spotted on the country road early in proceedings is pretty freaky. So to be fair to Xtro, it does dare to be different, even if it cannot entirely escape it's overall rubbishness in most other respects.