| Here’s a sci-fi film that’s really different. Sam and his son Tony are playing outside their farmhouse in rural England when a blinding bright light appears in the sky. The terrified child sees his father whisked away in a flash of light, and is permanently traumatized. Sam’s wife Rachel doesn’t buy the abduction story one iota. She’s convinced that her husband simply ran out on her and Tony to start a new life somewhere. So three years later, she’s living with an American fashion photographer named Joe in the middle of London. Tony doesn’t like his new stepfather. Perhaps it’s because Joe is a little on the obnoxious side, and trying to take Sam’s place. Or maybe he just doesn’t like stepfathers who look like Bob Dylan. He’s also been plagued by dreams of aliens since the whole traumatic experience. The same glowing light appears in the country once again, and crash lands into a forest near some farmland. A bizarre looking extra-terrestrial crawls out of the smouldering undergrowth. It’s a double jointed creature that runs around on all fours. It almost looks like a hairless sloth. It wanders onto a nearby road, and a Volvo station wagon hits the intergalactic visitor as it lurches into the path of the headlights. Bloody Volvo drivers. The driver of the vehicle gets out of the car to examine the bizarre creature lying wounded at the side of the car. The alien thanks him for his concern by spitting acid in his face, and stinging him with its lethal forked tongue. Then it disembowels his girlfriend. After traveling through outer space for so long, the intergalactic visitor is out to find a woman. Apparently the brunette wasn’t his type, and besides… everyone knows that aliens prefer to impregnate blondes. He finds one in a lonely farmhouse. After sneaking into the house and grabbing the screaming blonde by the ankle, the horny little critter wastes no time with a candlelit dinner, or even any kind of foreplay. The extraterrestrial’s vaginal-like organ opens, and long flexible type of space penis unfurls from the orifice. The alien gives oral sex a whole new meaning as it places the suction cup over his victim’s mouth in a bizarre space rape that blasts its way into the outer limits of poor taste. After a successful impregnation, the alien dissolves into a gooey mess on the floor. The poor girl doesn’t even have time to call the Weekly World News to sell them her ‘Gal raped by Space Alien’ story before her belly swells up, and the contractions begin. But she doesn’t give birth to a batch of hairless Sloth’s. She squeezes out… Sam. That’s right. The screaming space-rape victim pushes out a fully grown man. That’s gotta hurt. Then Sam proceeds to gnaw through his umbilical cord. After stealing the clothes and car of the man that was killed the night before, Sam tries to call Rachel. It isn’t a successful attempt. He’s unable to speak yet, and the telephone melts in his hand. He drives the Volvo to London with the brunette girl’s body still slumped in the passenger seat. Nobody pays any attention to the newborn’s erratic driving. It is after all a Volvo. The confused Sam dumps the car in a deserted car park. Then he tries to become a part of Rachel and Joe’s lives again, much to the chagrin of Joe. “This isn’t your home anymore” the photographer tells him. “That should be obvious”. Joe’s right to be suspicious. Sam isn’t quite normal. Tony catches his father devouring the eggs of his pet snake. “I needed them” Sam explains to his confused son. He tells Tony that things were very different in the world where he was living. “I had to be changed so I could live there” he reveals. He also gets to work changing Tony’s physiological make-up. As the change begins, the child finds that he can make thing move, and make other things change and appear at will. “If you think a lot about something, you can make it happen” his father explains. In a standout scene of the film, Tony envisions one of his plastic soldiers as a life-size moving toy. Then he sends the soldier to deal with the nasty neighbour in the flat downstairs. The cautious Mrs. Goodwyn answers a rap at the door after making sure the chain is fastened. A pair of bolt cutters slip through the gap, and snip the chain like a piece of string. The life-size toy soldier bayonets the terrified old biddy as she cowers under her couch. Tony also envisions midget clowns, black panthers, and other toys come to life to pursue the alien agenda as XTRO delves even further into the surreal. This was one of the prominent home video releases that really stirred up the wave of ‘video nasty’ hysteria in the United Kingdom and Australia during the early to mid-eighties. It does have some fairly extreme scenes, but like most of the ‘video nasties’ the backlash sprang more from the fact that it was effective psychological horror that elicited the response from moral crusaders. XTRO explored family decay, and touched on dark Fruedian sexual themes. There were plenty of films around that were more bloody than XTRO, yet quite shallow. These drew hardly a whimper from the thought police. On the other hand, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre spilled barely a drop of blood, yet was banned in a number of countries for many years after its release. Ironically the ‘video nasties’ are branded as such simply because they successfully work not only on a visual level, but also on a subconscious level. In a manner of speaking, being labeled as a ‘video nasty’ is a higher accolade for a film than an Academy Award ever could be. |
| XTRO aka. The Judas Goat (1982) |