I sure hope you like slimy and gross-out horror because that’s what B-Movie Enema has on tap for this week’s review!

Xtro is a 1983 sci-fi horror film that some think is one of the many responses to the 1982 runaway hit E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. I believe that misaligns this movie with those more exploitative or cash-grab knockoffs. Yes, E.T.’s immense popularity led to many movies that wanted to “answer back” by featuring nasty, very unfriendly alien invaders as an almost rejection of the big box office brought in by the very sweet and family-friendly film from Spielberg. This is not one of them for a couple of reasons.

The first is that I think this movie has much more credit to pay toward two late 70s sci-fi horror films; 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and 1979’s Alien. In Xtro, we have a very slimy and gross alien that wears the disguise of a recognizable human character. It is also weirder than that as far as where the alien comes from that we’ll dig into later. The primary reason why I do not think this is a response to E.T.’s popularity is because this film was originally intended to be released by New Line Cinema in 1982. Even if we give the conservative release schedule in 1982 of very late December, the production value, the creature, and some of the design work put into the movie wouldn’t have had time to get written, all the pre-production done, and the film shot and edited and put in the can for release that quickly after E.T. It just couldn’t have been possible.

Even on this film’s very scant $60,000 budget.

That’s probably the biggest surprise of them all… This movie was made for only 60,000 bucks. It looks good for such a small budget. The film was directed by a relative newcomer, Harry Bromley-Davenport. He directed only one film before working on Xtro, 1976’s Whispers of Fear. That film was hardly seen at all, but Bromley-Davenport’s next film credit was as co-screenwriter for 1977’s The Haunting of Julia which had a much bigger profile having starred Mia Farrow. Interestingly, that movie screened at Cannes in 1977, opened in the United Kingdom and Canada in 1978 (under the title Full Circle), but did not get released in the United States until 1981 (where it was renamed The Haunting of Julia). Part of this was the movie had a hard time finding an audience and its mixed-to-mostly-negative reviews likely hurt it getting legs.

Still, producer Mark Forstater was impressed with Bromley-Davenport’s Whispers of Fear and helped find a company to foot the bill on this movie which ended up scoring about a million bucks during a relatively short run. For a while, Xtro ended up on Britain’s infamous “Video Nasties” list, and this was one of the cases in which the movie does live up to the “nasty” part where so many of the other movies relegated to that list just simply didn’t. Reviews of the movie have never been that good, but I actually sharply disagree with most of the critical responses. We’ll be getting into that for certain during this review. However, the film was mildly popular enough to get some play on cable and a few home video releases over the course of the following 30 years. It’s not one that is readily available to folks. To find it, you usually have to either get an out-of-print DVD that will likely cost you more than you should pay or you have to find a gray market disk of it either on DVD or the occasional Blu-Ray rip.

Xtro’s primary source of recent exposure is due to an early episode of RedLetterMedia’s Best of the Worst show where it was featured. However, prior to that, there were two sequels… sort of. In 1991, Bromley-Davenport released Xtro II: The Second Encounter which was then followed up with 1995’s Xtro 3: Watch the Skies. Two things… First, you always have to be wary of sequels that start with Roman Numerals and drop them for Arabic Numerals like that. Second, both of the sequels are actually sequels in name only. They have no connection to this movie we’re about to dive into. Bromley-Davenport stated within the last decade or so that he has a fourth film planned called Xtro – The Big One that he’s hoping to get funding for and release.

However, that was 2015 when he announced that, and he’s currently in his mid-70s so the clock is ticking if you know what I mean.

Xtro begins interestingly. I mean that. The way this movie presents its alien and why the alien does what it does and why it is the way it is makes for a really interesting different take on the whole alien from outer space concept. The first establishing shot of the film is that of a fairly large estate in the English countryside. In the backyard, a father and son are playing with the family dog. The mother gets into the family station wagon and drives away, likely to run errands or whatever. Everything seems really happy and bright. Okay, maybe Tony, the kid is sad his mum is going off for errands or whatever she’s doing, but generally, it’s happy fun times at this estate in the picturesque countryside.

And here’s where things get really interesting. The dad, Sam, has a stick that he’s going to throw for the dog to go fetch. He throws the stick seemingly way up into the air. The stick suddenly freezes in mid-air and a bright white light bursts out of the sky and everything goes from sunny day to dark night in an instant. The dog is barking. Tony is asking what’s going on. Sam has no idea what is happening. It’s chaos.

A bright spotlight shines down on Sam and he is abducted with no indication of who or what is behind the light or this peculiar sudden change between day and night.

Three years later, Tony and his mother, Rachel (played by Bernice Stegers), are now living in the city. Living with them are Rachel’s new lover, Joe, and their live-in nanny, Analise (played by Maryam d’Abo who a few years later would become a Bond girl in The Living Daylights). Tony has dreams about his father, but Rachel tries to figure out how to explain that Sam isn’t going to come back. Tony is so convinced Sam will return that he doesn’t take to Joe and thinks he’s inferior in every way.

Well, Tony might just be onto something as out in the countryside, something is flying over the hills in the night sky. This glowing ship looks a lot like whatever it was three years prior that abducted Sam. We see that it has set some of the trees in the countryside on fire as it landed, or deposited something on Earth. That thing? One of the greatest, grossest movie monster aliens I’ve ever seen… Certainly one of the best for a $60k budget.

Just look at that thing… It’s so inhuman in appearance. Never mind its slimy body. Never mind the monster face. It’s the decision to have the performer playing this creature to prop himself up on his hands and feet backward and skitter around in that position. It’s so weird and so unsettling. But that ain’t the half of it. Wait a few more minutes for more of this abomination.

An unsuspecting couple is driving along this remote road and catches a look at the creature in the headlights. The man driving jumps out to investigate. There seems to be some sort of goo on the front bumper as if the creature was struck, but it’s hard to see a blood trail. That is until the man sees a spot of blood in the treeline and the creature sticks its head up and uses his tongue to strike at the man and kill him. The creature then goes to the car parked on the road and attacks the woman, killing her as well.

Meanwhile, back in the city, Tony’s had another dream and seeks comfort from Rachel only to walk in while Rachel and Joe are taking comfort with each other if you know what I mean and I think you do. The creature continues stalking the small wooded area where it finds a country house with a lone woman inside with her dog. The dog whines about something being off. And hoo boy is something going to be off. The creature gets inside the house and attacks the girl. But he doesn’t just, like, eat her face or throttle her or tear her arms off or anything like that. No, he impregnates her.

Now, that might seem like a bad enough thing – a gross alien monster thing has impregnated a perfectly normal, and fairly sexy, lady person just after killing a couple of other people. But it gets so much worse. The fetus grows extremely large extremely quick. Why? Well, we’re dealing with a completely different type of monster alien. When Sam and Tony had that weird business three years prior and Sam ended up missing? That was like an interdimensional rip in… spacetime… reality… the universe? I don’t know. I just know that it was a tear in the fabric of the cosmos. These aliens are interdimensional beings. Now Tony and Sam are linked in some way with each other and with that shenanigans of the other dimension.

First, while that alien impregnates that lady, all the way over in the city, Tony is covered with blood that did not come from him.

Tony is surprisingly calm. He’s not crying. He’s not hurt. He’s just covered in a whole lot of blood.

Back at the farmhouse in the country, that woman’s belly is growing pretty big. It’s like she’s carrying octuplets or… A full-grown person. Oh yeah. Now, I don’t mean to be overly gross by describing this, but the woman is lying on the floor and her belly is undulating. Then, her “water” breaks in a bunch of bloody goo. This woman, I might add, is mostly left alive until she gives birth. What comes out of her is a whole ass Sam. The scene is shockingly disgusting and one of the goriest things I’ve ever seen. It makes me want to toss my Funyuns.

It’s a truly vile and gross moment in this movie. I said this movie truly earned its spot on the Video Nasties list and here is the proof. I am not in favor of censorship of these movies, but if anything could be described as “nasty” Xtro fits the bill!

Oh, and just for some additional grossness, that lady’s cute little dog is licking and eating the weirdo four-legged alien’s deflated skin carcass.

Alright, so “daddy’s” back. He takes the clothes of the guy he killed on the side of the road and drives off with their car. When he gets to the city the next morning, he attempts to call Rachel but he can’t form words leading to Rachel just hanging up thinking it’s a poor connection. What’s more, the phone melts in Sam’s hand which kind of indicates that Sam’s new biology lets of a whole bunch of heat until he finally settles into his newly regained humanity.

Analise takes Tony to school and they pass a watching Sam. Rachel and Joe go off to do work things and, alone in the house, Analise and her boyfriend bang… HARD. I’m not sure if Albert Broccoli went to the movies and saw Maryam d’Abo in this full-frontal moment and thought she would be perfect for a relatively shy and girl-next-door Bond girl or what, but wow. She’s… She’s beautiful.

Anyway, Rachel leaves work to go pick Tony up from school. She plans to take him to the zoo in the hopes he will explain some things about the dreams and that incident with the blood thing the night before. When she gets to the school, they say Tony’s already been picked up by his father. She immediately dismisses that until the teacher says she saw it herself. She eventually finds Tony with Sam who she greets with a big ol’ slap for disappearing for the last three years.

Sam says he’s back, but he’s not sure where he’s been. He has no memory of the last three years since being taken. His first recognizable memories are of trying to call his apartment in the city and then seeing Tony walking to school. Sam gets cleaned up and he seems to be normal except for the gap in memories. He begins to remember the day he disappeared. He says he was at the cottage in the country and he saw a bright light and then he was gone.

Sam’s return creates a bit of a rift in Rachel and Joe’s life. Sam has no place to stay. Joe thinks he’s full of shit and he ran off to try something new, it didn’t work out, and now he’s back trying to slide right back into his old life. Rachel’s not entirely sure Sam’s lying about what happened to him. It’s possible something happened to him and he really did lose his memories. Of course, Tony’s over the moon that his dad’s back.

But is it really his father? He looks like Sam. He talks like Sam. He seems somewhat convincing when he says he doesn’t remember anything that happened to him. But he has this strange appetite for Tony’s pet snake’s eggs.

Here’s the thing about this movie and why I really like this flick. This is a whole other take on alien abduction. Very clearly Sam was whisked away by interdimensional beings to be studied or whatever. But it’s not like the typical scenario of a flying saucer beaming a guy up, probing his butt, and maybe putting some sort of electronic tagging chip inside him so they can keep tabs on him. No, the very nature from which these aliens come from is completely different. He talked about how warm the bright light was that took him away. When he tried to call the apartment, the phone melted in his hand. He had to impregnate a lady to rebirth himself at the same age he was when he was taken. There is something fundamentally changed about Sam that makes him no longer human.

This is a pretty neat take on aliens. Sure, it could just be a vehicle to figure out how to do the most cool and gross shit possible in 85 minutes, but it’s not going the cheap-o hack route of just having him being controlled by the aliens. He had to be changed into one of them in order to go where they are from. Sam is no longer fundamentally human. Would that be something that would have to change about people in order to travel to certain places in the universe? What if we do discover there are other dimensions and try to figure out a way to visit those dimensions? Seemingly, in the latter scenario, it’s very likely our makeup as it pertains to this dimension would not be compatible with that other dimension.. Right? Where’s Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking to try to explain this?

Dead? Both of them? Bummer… What about Neil DeGrasse Tyson? Is he still not answering our calls? Bummer. Anyway, I think that poses questions and scenarios that make this movie a little more unique.

Alright… So a couple things are going on here now. Tony caught his dad eating his pet snake’s eggs. He gets mad and runs away from Sam. While Sam chases after Tony, the snake escapes from her tank and slithers away. This will end up with the snake ending up in this annoying neighbor’s apartment. This neighbor has been seen a couple of times up to this point. She seems like a busybody and is always in everyone’s business. Put a bookmark in that business with the old lady. We’ll be coming back around to that.

Sam catches up to Tony and explains that he needed to eat those eggs. He’s not the same as he was before. Wherever he was taken, he had to be changed to go there, as I previously mentioned. He tells Tony he came back and wants to take him and Rachel with him when he returns to that other dimension. He then sucks on Tony’s shoulder to, I assume, give Tony some alien powers.

Well, I don’t have to assume. That night, as the adults have dinner, Tony’s in his room staring at a spinning toy that is turned off. As he stares at it, it begins to spin on its own. His next expression of those powers bring us back to the old lady who lives downstairs from Tony and his snake. The snake slips into her apartment by crawling between the walls and then down into the lady’s apartment through a light fixture. When she finds the snake, she uses a meat tenderizer to literally liquify the snake. She returns it to Rachel in a bag and tells her that Tony’s not responsible enough to care for a pet.

So what does Tony do? After learning from Sam how his new powers work, he concentrates real hard on a toy soldier he has. Now that the doll is brought to life, he sends the doll down to the old lady’s house to exact revenge for the death of the snake.

He also uses his power to bring another toy of his to life, in a much more terrifying way. I mean, that life-sized toy soldier is clever. The other toy, though? It’s a clown toy that then turns into a little person clown with a fisheye lens filming him as he tosses around a yo-yo with a bunch of razors on it. Neither the little person nor the clown would be terrifying on their own, but the combination and how it is made up is terrifying.

Basically, things are starting to shape up to play to whatever Sam’s plan is. He has successfully split up Rachel and Joe and goes with Rachel back to the cottage in the country. When Rachel and Sam arrive at the cottage, Rachel discovers a burn mark on the door signifying someone’s broken in and turned on the gas to the stove. Back in the city, Sam also seems to find Analise “perfect” for a very specific purpose. That is put into play by Tony. Tony wants to play hide and seek. She wants to fuck her boyfriend, but Tony won’t leave her alone. So she agrees to play one round where she’s attacked by the creepy clown guy in the elevator of the apartment building and knocked out.

When they move Analise into the apartment, Tony sucks on her belly to put a bunch of Xtro babies into her.

Analise’s boyfriend, Michael, goes looking for her. He searches each room and is soon followed by a toy tank. Soon, Michael discovers the tank is firing live rounds at him. He goes into the bathroom for shelter only to find Analise’s body in a cocoon-like substance and her body basically being used as a womb for all those Xtro eggs. Michael covers up the tank allowing him to think he’s escaped, but he runs into a puma that mauls him.

After Sam and Rachel have a day together at the cottage and Sam asks her about her relationship with Joe, Sam notices a chunk of his hair is falling out. It seems as though his human form is starting to decompose a bit. Speaking of human forms and changing and whatnot, Analise’s body has been changed as well so she can deliver the Xtro baby eggs. It’s like the bottom half of her body’s turned into a chute of sorts to roll eggs down through to be collected by the little person clown fella.

In the final moments of the movie, Rachel becomes concerned for Tony and Analise because she can’t call them to see how they are doing. Tony ordered his little clown goon to disconnect the telephone line for the apartment so they could continue their work to get the eggs from Analise’s corpse uninterrupted. Rachel then called a neighbor to go over and check it out but the clown killed him too. So it’s up to Joe who makes a startling discovery just after Rachel called to ask him to check on Tony.

Okay, so stick with me because this is a pretty good series of events that tie a lot of things together in terms of the danger that Sam poses. Okay, so “Sam” killed that one couple the moment he came back to Earth. He took the guy’s clothes and the car so he could get to London to find Rachel and Tony. He never actually disposed of the woman’s body from the car. So when the car was eventually found, the police found her with her guts ripped out. Later, after Sam was able to get different clothes from Rachel he ditched the blazer he had from the dead guy. In the pocket of the dead guy’s blazer were two things… A whole wad of cash and a picture of his girlfriend, the girl whose corpse was found in the car once Sam drove it to London. Sam says he didn’t know the girl but it kind of stuck with Rachel and makes her think that maybe Joe was right and Sam took off with another woman, it didn’t work out, and he came back hoping to slide right back into Rachel’s life. She takes the photo to Joe before she and Sam went to the cottage. Joe is a photographer and, in his studio, he has a birdcage with a parakeet. When Rachel called him to see if he’d check on Tony, Joe was changing the bottom of the cage. In the newspaper he used is the story of the girl’s body being found. Realizing there is a connection, he tries to call Rachel back but Sam, believing that Rachel is calling too many people to get mixed up in this business, melted the phone line preventing Joe from getting through and telling Rachel.

Got it? Good. Now, with about ten minutes to go, Joe knows that Sam is up to no good but, uh oh spaghettios, when he leaves his studio to go get Tony and then get to Rachel to help her, he finds Tony waiting for him outside. Also… That sign next to the studio door reads “Walter Gotell LTD.” Walter Gotell was the actor who played the head of the Russian KGB in the James Bond movies of the time. Coincidence or is that the same Walter Gotell? The world may never know.

Joe is basically the final obstacle remaining. He’s got a key role to play here as he tells Tony to get into the car because he’s going to take him to the cottage to see his mother. That’s exactly where Tony wants to be. While they are on the way to the cottage, Sam and Rachel have sex, which is probably for alien purposes? Anyway, Sam’s skin is falling off.

By the way, this isn’t the only weirdo sex scene Bernice Stegers ever had in her acting career. Someday I’ll cover 1980’s Macabre in one form or another because… wowzers. There’s some real bonkers stuff in that movie.

With each passing minute, Sam looks worse and worse. It’s like whole chunks of flesh is coming off him. Joe arrives to deal with this and tells Tony to stay in his car and lock the doors. Naturally, the moment Joe goes inside the cottage, Tony gets out of the car to find Sam. Tony’s complexion is not looking so good either. Joe and Rachel run for the car and discover Tony’s gone and that Sam’s got him. When Joe approaches the duo to stop them, Sam lets out a literal brain-melting scream that kills Joe. Rachel follows Sam and Tony as she sees them heading for a bright light in the woods. There, the two have turned into their alien forms and Tony calls out for his mother as they board the interdimensional craft to leave Earth.

With basically nothing left, the most common ending of the movie finds Rachel returning to the apartment. What she doesn’t quite expect to find is the surprise in the fridge – all those alien eggs that shot out of Analise’s goopy egg chute. Not only that, the whole apartment is completely redecorated to be bright white, dreamlike rooms. At first, it seems as though she might be kind of cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs and plans to take care of these alien eggs as she picks one up and stares at it for a bit, but then it bursts open and latches onto her face, killing her.

The alternate ending that I believe was only ever screened in Germany has Rachel return home with the white walls and all the look of the more common ending. The main difference is that it appears Rachel is pregnant. Remember, she had sex with Sam, so she’s got a little hybrid baby in her. Well, instead of finding the eggs which would ultimately become her downfall, she’s surrounded by a whole bunch of little kids who look vaguely like Tony. They reach out and lightly touch her pregnant belly and seem to be almost congratulating her or showing appreciation for her hybrid baby. No shock ending with the eggs bursting and killing her or anything like that. It’s just a clear ending that that the aliens have a presence on Earth going forward.

Xtro is a bleak movie. In the more common ending, it spares no one. In fact, aside from Sam, our primary cast of Rachel, Tony, and Analise are given fairly gnarly conclusions. Analise is turned into a womb personified. Tony is turned into a monster. Rachel is left to think she survived this horrible ordeal but ultimately gets killed anyway by the alien egg monsters birthed out of Analise’s egg chute. Typically, you’d think that maybe Tony could be saved in some way, maybe even by Joe, but nope.

And I think it’s all laid out for us at the beginning of the movie in the present-day timeline as to why this isn’t going to work out for anyone. Tony’s a little bit of a turd. Sure, he still has a connection with Sam, but he is a turd to Joe. Rachel is a weak and ineffective mother by not trying to figure out a way to make Tony talk about the strange dreams and that whole blood all over his body situation. Joe and Rachel can’t seem to get along on how to deal with Tony’s problems. Analise spurns the suggestion of Tony getting professional psychiatric help. Then we notice that she really just likes fucking her boyfriend and kind of barely takes care of Tony when left alone with him. And Sam is a monster.

Everybody’s got a fault in their personality. Even the two older neighbors we meet. The old lady sucks and liquified a kid’s pet almost out of spite. The old guy in the final act who gets it in the elevator is two-faced by being all sweet and helpful to Rachel when they speak on the phone, but when he hangs up, he calls her a bitch. Tony uses his powers for nothing but spite and retribution. It’s like everyone has something that ultimately makes them irredeemable in the end.

One thing I do have to say about the ending with Rachel being killed by the alien egg thing, I always felt like that was tacked on.Like there was a decision made to end the movie with a stinger. Bernice Stegers doesn’t quite look the same in that scene as she did in other scenes. The whole apartment being this bright white, dreamlike set feels weird and off and unlike anything else in the movie. I feel like it was a way to end the movie with a stinger and also correct a slight oversight with nothing having been done with the eggs they got from Analise’s body.

Aaaaand that’s kind of the truth. The original ending was the one with pregnant Rachel. That was Bromley’s original ending. But New Line’s Robert Shaye, who also served as a producer on the film, felt the ending was too bland and that’s why we get the ending we all know. I don’t know if I really like either ending… At least I don’t have an ending I prefer over the other.

Regardless, I do think the movie is much, much better than its reputation. Again, this movie is made for 60,000 bucks. The creature effects are amazing. The effects were done by Tom Harris who would go on to work on some big-time stuff. He worked in the effects departments for movies like 2000’s Sexy Beast, 2002’s Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, and the 2019 Watchmen miniseries. Xtro was a great showcase for what Harris could do.

The whole movie has a nightmare quality to it. It’s almost made to scare kids and gross adults out. I think that’s what I find the most interesting about this movie whenever I watch it. It’s so weird but takes itself seriously and has some pretty good things to make you feel pretty uneasy. What more could you possibly want from a sci-fi horror flick? If you can find Xtro out there (I think it’s currently on YouTube), check it out if you like some gnarly gore with your gooey alien monsters.

Next week, for only the second time ever on this blog, I’ll be looking at an Al Adamson classic. Join me for a review for Brain of Blood from 1971! But before you do that, tune in tomorrow for a new episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series as we watch Island of the Dead from 2000. So until then, the next time you see a big glowing triangle in the sky, think about it before you go in. You might come out the other side as a gross, gooey monster alien!