XTRO 3: WATCH THE SKIES
Watch something else

I don't remember much of the first Xtro, except one awesomely creepy still in a book of a midget clown removing eggs from a cocooned woman in a bathtub.  Xtro 2 I was surprised to find myself rather liking; it's as well-done an Alien ripoff as I've seen, though the ripping off is done with rather meticulous exactitude.  Xtro 3, however, kinda sucks.

None of the Xtro movies seem to have anything to do with one another, and I don't think the original film was really enough of a hit to justify sequels, so I don't know why these scripts, which I can only assume were originally unrelated a la the Die Hard movies, keep getting released as if they were part of a series, unless director Harry Bromley Davenport (who helmed all three films) insisted.

A group of marines is sent out to a remote island under the impression that they're there to defuse old bombs.  When they get there, they find that there's a lot more to their mission than they'd thought (and there are bunnies everywhere!), and the fact that most of them are totally incompetent is part of the reason they were chosen, if you know what I mean.  Then they have to do battle with a camouflaging Predator-like alien, while helicopters shoot at them, and they shoot and other marine guys, and Robert Culp back home is no help at all.

The "government conspiracy to cover up an alien arrival" thing was done to death by The X-Files a dozen times and continues to be done to death by it about two or three times a year, so I don't really see why any other movies need to jump on this broken-down bandwagon.  The alien itself looks great in closeups of its face, but loses all credibility when the camera backs off a bit.

There's a lot of weird organ music, better suited to Gothic castles and mist-shrouded graveyards than, one would think, marines under attack from aliens and helicopters, so I don't know what led the composer to use it.  Likewise, that alien keeps rasp/shrieking like a panther, suggesting to me that the foley guys just didn't know what else to use.

At least there's a cool "Croatan" reference for Storm Of The Century fans, beating that one to the punch by three or four years. And the only really likeable character in the movie (played by Karen Moncrieff, sadly given a rather unceremonious and unpleasant exit) has an amusingly Tonya Harding-like past, suggesting to me that screenwriter Daryl Haney is a fan.  Not like it adds up to anything special in the end.

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