Father’s day is here early this year, kiddies. Gather ‘round, ye schooner men, for tonight there’s a tale to warn. Strange things lurk in these parts. Lights in the sky, giant cricket men, and EVIL MIDGET HENCHCLOWNS! Well, just the one henchclown, but it’s pretty fuckin’ scary nonetheless.
That’s right, tonight’s movie is the classic 1980’s Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind meets Alien Prey meets Pod People meets some Lifetime Network movie about a guy who leaves his wife and kid and then kidnaps the son, Xtro.
Sam and his son Tony are playing in the yard of their cottage, when a thrown fetching stick freezes in the air for a brief moment before it explodes in a shower of radiance. The sky turns from sunny afternoon to pitch-black night in seconds, and a gale-force wind whips the countryside. When the storm dies, Sam is nowhere to be found.
Three years later, mother Rachel has moved in with a new man, Joe, and Tony still has nightmares about his dad’s disappearance, although he’s been convinced by his mom that he just left because he didn’t love them anymore. After all, she wasn’t there to witness the alien abduction and no one but the Japanese ever believe anything a child tells them.
When Tony is found in his bed covered with stigmata blood, claiming “Daddy sent it”, Rachel and Joe are naturally worried. Even more so when Sam picks Tony up after school one day, claiming not to have any memory of the last three years.
They have good reason to be concerned, since Sam was returned to Earth via a vaguely insectoid backwards-walking impregnation machine, and popped rather graphically and fully-grown from the vagina of an unfortunate country woman after a gestation period of about ten minutes. Of course they don’t know this, but since this scene is what landed Xtro on the UK Video Nasties list, as well as being the coolest part of the movie, it’s worth mentioning. I think that, as disgusting as the birth is, the part of the scene that really sticks with me for some reason is when the woman wakes up from being impregnated by the giant cricket man, her dog is seen in the background eating the remains of the monster, which has melted into a gooey puddle on her floor after delivering its sticky cargo. A nice, sick little detail that less creative minds wouldn’t have thought to add.
After a bunch of obnoxious family drama that I could do without, Rachel finds a wad of money and a picture of a woman that the cricket monster killed in Sam’s jacket pocket (a jacket which he lifted off her dead boyfriend). Concerned for her and Tony’s safety, and Sam’s metal health, she takes him to the cottage in hopes that a trip home will jog his memory.
In reality, his memory is perfectly fine, and he has been infecting his son with alien DNA and a few strange powers. From here on out, the movie takes a hard left-turn from creepy horror story to LSD mindfuck-o-rama like only 1980’s British sci-fi/horror Alien tagalongs can.
While Sam and Rachel are out of town, and Joe is away on business, Tony turns several of his toys -- including a creepy midget clown with a flying yo-yo guillotine, and a mechanical soldier with a harpoon gun (don’t ask me what use an army dude has for a fucking harpoon gun, this movie is just weird) -- into his minions of doom. He kills the old woman downstairs (who, in an irritating bit of what I think is supposed to be comic relief, kills his pet snake when it escapes and winds up in her food, but it gives the soldier something to do, I guess), the building superintendent, and captures his au pair Analise and turns her into a human egg sac ala Dallas in that deleted scene from Alien. Oh, and Analise’s boyfriend stumbles upon the mess and is eaten…BY A FUCKING BLACK PANTHER! Jesus, what the hell were they on when they wrote this, and where do I get it?
After Tony and the EVIL MIDGET HENCHCLOWN! have finished harvesting Analise’s eggs and putting them in a glowing, upturned refrigerator full of gak (I told you, the movie is fucking weird), Joe returns home. Concerned that Rachel is gallivanting off with an amnesiac madman, he grabs Tony and heads for the cottage. He arrives just in time to see Sam’s skin melt off, revealing a humanoid-insectoid skeleton monster (distinctly different from the one which delivered the Sam-seed earlier) underneath. Bug-Sam and Tony head off together for their spaceship, which has landed atop a nearby hill. When Joe tries to stop them, Sam emits a piercing shriek which literally blows Joe’s mind. Tony, also melting into a bug monster, takes one last look at Rachel and boards the ship.
Back home, Rachel discovers that the evil midget henchclown has apparently redecorated her apartment. It’s now stark, glowing white, containing nothing but the fridge full of eggs. One of them explodes a sort of alien cock-and-balls onto her face, and there you have it.
Good goddamn, what a ride. It’s every bit as strange as I remember it being, and unfortunately every bit as slow, too. For all that cool shit I just told you about, there’s a whole other reel-and-a-half of Joe and Rachel and Sam arguing about custody of Tony, whether Rachel still loves Sam, whether she and Joe are going to get married, blah blah fucking goddamn shut the hell up blah. And then there’s that obnoxious old woman who kills the snake. I get that she’s there to show off Tony’s cool killer toy powers, but she plays a relatively prominent part for someone who’s just there to get stabbed to death. Too damn prominent. It’s fucking annoying, with the stupid comic relief music played over all her scenes. Ugh. Just kill the old bat already.
Still, if you love those 80’s British outer-space horror flicks like I do (a movie with a markedly different plot, but very similar atmosphere, is Horror Planet a.k.a. Inseminoid – good shit, check it out), you’ll have a hard time not enjoying this one.
Moral of the Story: When you see the giant cricket man, SHOOT THE FUCKING GIANT CRICKET MAN!
H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. Rating: 
- This one is better watched by yourself. You and your buddies will have a great time gasping in wonder at all the weird shit that happens, but when the talking starts (and there’s a LOT of it), your own conversations will drown out the movie and you’ll end up with nothing but a mishmash of weird imagery to take away from the experience.
Sequels: Xtro II: the Second Encounter ;
Xtro 3: Watch the Skies
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