Welcome to another B-Movie Enema review descending down from the stars!

In 1983, Xtro came out to little fanfare and a lot of negative reviews. It found itself on the infamous Video Nasties list in its home country, the United Kingdom. But over time, the movie would get a little bit of a following. This is probably thanks to cable and video stores here in the United States, but it is very likely the movie really never did much in terms of success to warrant a sequel (let alone two sequels).

Here’s where the backstory of how we have two Xtro sequels begins. Director Harry Bromley Davenport was in need of a job in the movie-makin’ biz. Well, somewhere along the way, he discovered that while he had no ownership of his 1983 film, he actually legally owned the title “Xtro”. So, this gave Bromley Davenport the idea to create an anthology series of sequels about other alien shenanigans. And that begins with 1991’s Xtro II: The Second Encounter.

But things will take yet another twist…

To remedy the no job and no money issue that Bromley Davenport was having, he needed to license the rights to make more Xtro films. He sold those rights off to a Welsh producer named John Eyres who got some money from a Canadian company called North American Pictures. The downside to getting a job to direct and the money to use the title for Bromley was he was completely shut out of any creative control. Instead, John A. Curtis, Stephen Lister, Robert Smith, and Edward Kovach were brought in as co-co-co-writers.

I do not know for sure if that is Robert Smith from The Cure, but boy do I hope it is.

Anyway, Bromley Davenport hated the narrative, calling it “artless” and kind of generic for the sci-fi market of the early 90s. He more or less never held back from telling his moneymen overlords he was unhappy with the narrative and the product. That said, Bromley Davenport was reported to be professional and just simply tried to make the best possible movie he could. There was a major issue during filming, though… the star of the movie.

Jan-Michael Vincent is kind of an all-timer in terms of cautionary tales in Hollywood. Vincent grew up in a family that had a lot of criminals in it. His grandfather and uncles were bank robbers in the 1920s and 30s. This resulted in his father ultimately being left alone at the age of 12 when the last of his family members in the life of crime were arrested. But Jan-Michael came along in 1944 and was a decent enough student to graduate from a California high school and go to a community college for three years. He said he was ready to pay for his fourth year but claimed the registration clerk literally shut the window in his face for her lunch hour. So he basically said “fuck that” and took that $200 to Mexico to party.

By 1967, he got into acting and got roles in movies and on TV. He’d get some decent roles in movies like The Mechanic with Charles Bronson and Hooper with Burt Reynolds. But his biggest role, or the one that should have been a star-making role, was as the lead in the TV series Airwolf. This was the other property in the mid-80s that dealt with a bitchin’ attack helicopter. Airwolf was a decent success, but after CBS dropped the series after the third season, USA picked up the fourth and final season and completely recast the series.

But what makes Vincent’s life a cautionary tale is his personal life. While he was known for assaulting people a few times in his career, including his second wife, his biggest issue was addiction. He abused drugs and alcohol for most of his life. He was arrested several times for bar brawls, possession of cocaine, and drunk driving throughout his career as an actor. When he got into car accidents, he nearly died each time. At least one of his accidents he claimed to have absolutely no memory of. That’s how drunk he was. Later, due to all of his health problems exacerbated by his abuse of drugs and alcohol, he had to have the bottom part of one of his legs amputated. He was a mess, but the unfortunate thing was that Vincent could have had a decent career. It wasn’t like he was a bad actor or not good looking enough to be consistently employed, but his extracurricular activities continuously got in the way of that possible career.

Those activities also created an issue on Xtro II. Bromley Davenport recounted, “It was an awful film with a drunkard Jan-Michael Vincent wandering around, throwing up and hitting people. He was ghastly. He couldn’t play a scene with somebody else because he was so out of it that he couldn’t remember his lines, or what the scene was. He made no effort at all in that film. He probably singlehandedly wrecked the project.”

So… I guess that’s the best place to leave the preamble and actually start watching the movie…? I… uh… I guess?

Xtro II begins with an action soundtrack that’s heavy on drums like we’re about to see military guys do military things for the next 90 minutes. Now, I don’t know nuthin’ about that, but I do know the movie opens with a woman in a helicopter flying over a snowy mountain range during the credits. What is she looking for? Xtros? Probably Xtros.

We’ll worry about that later. For now, we go to the clandestine Nexus facility. There, Defense Secretary Kenmore arrives to meet with the dorks in labcoats (otherwise known as research scientists) to take a look around. The facility is run entirely by computer. Kenmore meets with Dr. Alex Summerfield who runs the… Well, I was going to say he runs the facility, but computers manage a lot of stuff. Summerfield is just the top fleshy human guy here. This place does a lot of cool stuff like works with particles that can travel at the speed of light or even travel interdimensionally. And that’s just done on level 1 of this 13-floor underground lab.

Kenmore is not quite on board with the work they do in this lab. He doesn’t like the idea of sending personnel to other dimensions. Past defense secretaries were cool about this stuff, but Kenmore is stuffy. He thinks these guys are just sucking resources. Kenmore is here to take a look at a live run of sending a trio of people to this other dimension. The person who oversees the entire process of this experiment is Dr. Julie Casserly. Her warm welcome to Secretary Kenmore is calling him the man who wants to shut them down.

They call this “duo-tangents” which I guess beats me to the punch in going off on tangents during this review. But yeah, apparently the trio of travelers go somewhere because they step onto a pad and they are transported away. They are still able to communicate with the team. Visuals come back and it’s a peculiar world. In a sort of way, it kind of looks like in Alien when they go to LV-426. They see an alien landscape and strange structures. Things start to go haywire. Dr. Casserly starts to order the personnel to return to where they can be brought back to Earth. They never return.

Summerfield wants to immediately send a strikeforce team to recover the team. Kenmore is a government stooge who likes guns and pew pews as the Defense Secretary of the United States, so he’s into the idea of sending guns and bombs into another dimension. Shiiit… Does that extra-dimensional planet got any oil? If so, we’re callin’ dibs!

Casserly says they need to bring in Dr. Ron Shepherd (Vincent). Summerfield is most definitely not a fan of that idea. Apparently, Shepherd was kind of to blame for blowing up another facility in Texas. However, Casserly says that he is the only person they know who has been to “the other side” and returned. Shepherd and Casserly used to be fuck buddies which Summerfield likes to throw out into the public. Kenmore grants Casserly permission to get Dr. Shepherd. If he cannot bring those three back from the other dimension, he’s going to terminate Project Nexus. Terminate it!

(For real, he says he will terminate Nexus and then shouts TERMINATE! once more.)

Also, just when you thought we were never going to see anything about that woman flying in the helicopter over the snowy mountains from the credits again, well, that was b-roll from a future moment in the movie. It was Casserly flying to wherever Shepherd is to get him for this mission. How ’bout that for dumb editing?

Speaking of editing, remember that thing earlier about how Bromley Davenport hated Vincent and said he couldn’t work with any other actor because he was a goddamn nightmare? It is very very very obvious he is not in the same place as the actress playing Casserly (Tara Buckman). I know this because it is just shot and reverse shots of the actors reciting lines. They are never seen together in a single frame of this scene. In fact, when he agrees to go with Casserly, the movie smash cuts to the chopper taking off, ostensibly with both Shepherd and Casserly on board, and radio dialog saying they are en route.

Surprisingly, they are seen together when they arrive at Nexus. They arrive together for a brief scene that is more or less meaningless to the entirety of the plot. He wanders around and she asks if he’s got some deja vu from the layout of the Texas facility. He then slurs a line about how the country was supposed to be bankrupt as he looks at some box in the hallway. Vincent is so checked out and it’s kind of funny, but also sort of sad.

He’s not really a character in this movie up to this point. This is mostly the two scientists battling over this project and the people lost in the other dimension. Sure, Shepherd is important because I guess he knows some things he can tell other characters and possibly become action man later, but I’ll be damned if he’s really not done anything important to any plot threads in this movie other than Casserly and Summerfield yelling over Shepherd’s presence. He’s supposedly the star of this movie but so far it’s mostly been these other two scientists.

Anyway, one of the three people who “duo tangented” to the other dimension was picked up during a scan for lifeforms. It’s the woman of the three, Marshall. She’s alive but she doesn’t exactly look good. she’s a sweaty mess, her lips are blue, and she seems to barely respond to people when she’s first brought in and checked out. When Summerfield tries to question her about what happened to the others, she attacks him and grabs him by the throat after making a very strange sound. The base’s doctor says she’s in shock and needs to sedate her so no more questioning for Summerfield for now.

I mean, she tried to throttle her boss, but, sure, sure… she’s in shock.

Things get a little hectic here now. The rescue team is about to be sent after the other two missing guys in the other dimension. There’s some scientist guy looking at and studying the condensation in Marshall’s helmet. Then Shepherd attempts inject Marshall with something and is caught by Summerfield and is handcuffed to keep from messing with anything else. Then Summerfield tells Casserly that he’s going to fire her as well. It’s terribly erratic. All of that happens in like 30 seconds of screen time. It’s insane. It’s jarring. I don’t know if there were just other shots they wanted to have but never got and just used what they had and desperately tried to save it in editing or what.

It is entirely possible this is the side effect of maybe not really getting much quality work from Jan-Michael Vincent or possibly being unable to have him in the same scene as any of the other actors.

One important thing does happen at the end of his jumbled mess of editing… Marshall’s body unzips like it’s a skin suit. The computer alerts the base that there is a biohazard contagion discovered. A little monster fella busts out of Marshall’s torso and escapes into the ventilation system. It just kind of bursts out of her body in a portion near her chest. I’m willing to bet that’s something you’ve never seen before in a movie.

So the rescue mission to the other dimension is postponed. A bunch of extras, er, I mean lower-ranked lab guys are evacuated. But a new problem presents itself. The base’s doctor, Lisa, is trapped after the section where Marshall’s biohazard thing happened was quarantined. So she needs to be saved.

Meanwhile, here are the four guys who were supposed to go with guns to the other dimension on the original rescue mission plan:

This team, we’ll call them Seal Team Sux, has mostly been seen in this one room. Sometimes they are wearing their spacesuits. Sometimes they are wearing their civilian clothing. For the most part, they barely interact with anyone other than themselves up to this point in the movie.

I wanted to make mention that there were, indeed, four different writers credited for this movie. These are the things that make it feel that way. We have wayyyy too many threads that we’re following here and it feels like elements of four different scripts. First, we have the interdimensional travel thing that will lead to an Xtro being brought here and shenanigans ensuing. Second, we have the interpersonal conflicts of Summerfield and Casserly. For some reason, he really wants to make a point that she fucked around with Shepherd. Is he threatened by her and this project? Does he love her? Are they fucking around currently? Is it all meant to curry favor with the Defense Secretary? No idea. It’s not explained. I guess they just hate each other. Then there’s Seal Team Sux. What are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to be Shepherd’s team? Wait… Is Shepherd supposed to be going to the other dimension or just telling them what to expect? Then there’s Shepherd himself. It seems like he should be intertwined with all these other plot lines, but he’s not really. People talk at him. He talks at them. He wanted to do something to Marshall. I presume he was trying to euthanize her because he knows she is carrying an Xtro, but why won’t he say anything about that? Isn’t he here because he knows what to do and expect with this inter-dimensional travel jazz?

These are all possible primary plots of their own but they are crammed together in very awkward ways. Ostensibly, the primary plot is the travel to this other dimension opened the door for an Xtro to come to Earth and fuck shit up. Got it. So… why are all these other things still happening into the second act of the movie?

Summerfield, Casserly, and a third scientist find Marshall’s body. She appears to be charred, but the third scientist whose name I do not care to learn says that this looks like absolute dehydration (whatever that actually means) and that it should take years for a body to do that. Some sort of combustion occurred but there is no sign of a fire. They do notice that the grate to the vent is busted up.

Casserly says she’s going to get “Ford” to help them out. However “Ford” is working on something and is soon attacked by the Xtro and is long dead before Casserly arrives to collect him. Elsewhere, one of Seal Team Sux has a crush on Lisa, the base’s doctor. They are going to fuck in her office but she gets eaten by the Xtro and the member of Seal Team Sux pulls an alarm calling the rest of his team that is already well prepped and ready for action to blow up an Xtro. Why they are actually carrying their guns and ready to repel some sort of intruder or monster without having been told anything other than they can’t go on the original rescue mission is way beyond my feeble brain.

Seriously. Two of the members of Seal Team Sux are already scouring the base with their guns. The moment they hear the alarm pulled by that third member looking to sex up the doctor, they immediately spring into action as if they already know what to look for, what they are fighting, and that they need to shoot it. This movie is quite bad.

We can sit around and debate the quality of the original Xtro or the true connection to its original and smooth interaction of what appeared to be a movie made of two different stories smooshed together of Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor, but at least, in the end, those movies are absolutely cohesive. The first Xtro is a good movie (in my estimation). Metamorphosis had problems compared to The Deadly Spawn, but compared to Xtro II? Holy shit, it’s night and day.

Anyway, remember I said that Marshall attacked Summerfield? Well, he’s starting to act a little weird. It also turns out that his wounds are taking on odd qualities. He’s also having dreams of Marshall being sexy and some of what was seen in the other dimension.

Alright so it’s exposition dump at the halfway point of this movie. Summerfield, Seal Team Sux, Casserly, and Shepherd are brought into the conference room. Now is the time for Shepherd to tell his story. He blew up the Texas facility because of an Xtro that got loose. He also knows the other two guys that were sent with Marshall are also dead. All he knows about what they are up against is it’s some sort of lifeform with “a taste for human life.” He gives all this exposition and all the other characters talk about stuff with no shot that shows him in the same room with the rest of them.

The station says that every level of Nexus has been contaminated and the base is going into full lockdown mode. Before the base is completely shut off from the outside world, Seal Team Sux gets some equipment from their car. That means the leader of the team now has a pretty bitchin’ gun to go Xtro-huntin’.

McShane, the guy in charge of Seal Team Sux, says he’s now in charge because, as he sees it, this is now a combat situation what with the killer Xtro running around and eating people. Casserly comes up with a plan. There’s enough of them in the base to split into three teams to do searches to find the Xtro and blow it up… I think. I think that’s what they want to do. There’s that problem and there’s the problem with the fact that if they don’t destroy the “contamination” the Nexus computer will pump a shitload of deadly radiation to clean itself. So, yeah, there are a couple of issues here with a ticking clock element in the narrative.

I should also mention another problem with this movie is that the Xtro has not been seen in any kind of light. Every time we see it, it’s in the dark, or in silhouette, or as a shadow. We have not yet seen the monster in the flesh totally as it were. It would be one thing if it has only attacked one person but it has attacked and killed three people. So it’s very obvious they either have a very bad monster or no monster at all. A concept of a monster if you will.

So when a significant chunk of this movie takes place in darkened rooms and corridors and they are trying to chase after the Xtro, we have no real idea what we are shooting at or what we’re scared of. Granted, we see the Xtro’s eyes, or a very quick shot of the monster’s face, but we’re really not getting much from it and it’s really starting to piss me off. Everything about this movie is pissing me off.

Now, Seal Team Sux turns out to be a pretty apt name for this group of mercenaries. Their leader, McShane, the one with the bitchin’ gun you’d think Arnold would use to shoot a Predator, is killed by getting his face eaten. He is the first of the people going around and searching for the monster to die. He is the first to die in the big action/thriller sequence, people. Fucking Christ, he had the best gun. He was the leader of a bunch of “bad ass” mercenaries. He gets his face eaten first.

Fuck.

Another member of Seal Team Sux also apparently dies somewhere along the way. Again, it’s really hard to see what’s going on. It’s like I got up in the middle of the night to take a piss and forgot to turn on any lights or put my glasses on to see. We do get to see our “best”(?) look at the Xtro to this point in this scene too as it corners some of our heroes(?) into a corner and slowly approaches them. But don’t worry… the film’s powers that be decided we needed no lighting placed on it.

But I know what you might be saying… You’re thinking it might not be fair for me to judge this incredibly dark shot of our big, bad monster in this monster movie. After all, only Xtro and Xtro 3 have ever seen a high definition mastering on Blu Ray. This movie’s most recent remastering was for DVD about 18 years ago. I agree. This is maybe 720p resolution. STILL… Imagine watching this shit on VHS or on a shitty old tube TV. Fuck, remember the old big screen TVs that if you weren’t setting perfectly perpendicular to its screen, you wouldn’t be able to see everything projected onto it?

So, there you go. Fuck you. Give me some lights on my goddamn Xtro monster, please. Shit.

Summerfield is starting to act even more strangely. He talks like a cartoon villain. He refuses to open any doors for them and instead suggests they go to a hatch that can be manually opened. It turns out not to be that easy as now Summerfield wonders if they should help them open any doors and give them the codes to do it. After all, aren’t they containing something extremely dangerous if they leave the doors locked? Eventually, though, the Xtro is killed and it seems all the bad stuff is over.

The guy in the control room with Summerfield is also maybe my favorite guy in this whole movie? He talks strangely. Like he sounds like a text-to-voice program, but not a shitty one. I’m talking about the kind that wants to convince you he’s human. But then he talks with the cadence of a child too. He’s either incredibly naive or doesn’t like using contractions or is a secret robot that will be a final scene twist reveal.

With only about 20 minutes of plot left in the movie, Xtro II suddenly remembered it forgot to include any sexual tension. Sure, maybe the dreamlike spectre of Marshall was creeping into Summerfield’s sleep, but this is a little more explicit. After the remaining survivors make it out of the corridors to the main control room, I guess someone decided that Jan-Michael Vincent needs to have a makeout scene with Tara Buckman. She’s in her quarters cleaning up after all the scary chase stuff and he just comes up and kisses her on the neck and tells her she’s looking good and that he missed her.

There is absolutely no reason for this nor is there any chemistry between these two, but I digress.

Anyway, the final two members of Seal Team Sux are having major problems with Summerfield. Meanwhile, Shepherd doesn’t believe the monster is truly dead. Well, they would both have a common bad feeling. Summerfield is still transforming into something other than human.

So just when we think that the monster is dead and we are going into a period of calm that ultimately leads to the endgame of this movie, only to reveal that Summerfield is another monster, we continue to have business that I think makes this movie waaaaay too long. The plan, I guess, is to blow some stuff up to perhaps escape the lockdown. Also, Shepherd is sent to do some sort of override of the system. But when the charge goes off to blow the door open, the Xtro is waiting on the other side causing the nerdy guy who kind of talks like a robot and/or child to fall to his doom in an elevator shaft. This also eventually leads to the death of a third member of Seal Team Sux.

So here we are in the final minutes of the movie. All we have left is a hippy member of Seal Team Sux, named Zunoski, Shepherd, Casserly, and Summerfield. After realizing that Summerfield has an injury they somehow get the idea to review the footage of his interaction with Marshall. They realize she impregnated him with Xtro eggs… Or, as I like to call them: Xtreggs. Casserly and Zunoski try to convince Summerfield to go to the other dimension because they can make sure all those Xtreggs are over there and not here where they will be all sorts of problems for them and for humanity. Elsewhere, Shepherd finds the Xtro and uses that bitchin’ sci-fi guy that Seal Team Sux brought to the base to shoot the Xtro to pieces. He then helps Casserly put Summerfield on the little teleportation pad to send him to the other dimension just as he is transforming into a monster.

In the end, Zunoski, Casserly, and Shepherd just all shrug and try to figure out what the hell they will tell the rest of the world about what happened.

This movie is pretty awful. This is a nearly 90-minute movie that does not have much more than about 70 minutes of content. It’s a lot of people wandering around dark hallways and hunting for a monster that is mostly hiding in darker parts of the dark hallways. I’m not going to say there isn’t at least a nugget of a fun monster movie here because of course there is, but everything about what we ultimately got here is just garbage. Vincent is barely worth being here. You could have gotten a lesser name to play the part that would have given far more to this for less money. You had characters that you just know are fodder. You have the whole team of mercenaries who are ultimately completely useless. The movie looks like shit and half the cast didn’t give two fucks to really try to do anything with what they were given.

Simply put, Xtro II is a waste of time and I’m actually kind of angry that I watched it.

So let’s abort this fuckin’ review and look forward to next week which is… sigh… Valentine’s Day. Well, that’s not making me feel any better about anything. Well, if nothing else, I can at least watch something pretty good for the review. So, let’s go north of the border for a 1981 slasher classic. Get your pickaxes and those helmets with those little lights on them and join me in the mines as we seek out the lone survivor of a terrible mining accident in My Bloody Valentine.

Until then, keep watching the skies… or don’t. I don’t really care. Xtro II removed all capacity for me to care about anything. I’m… I’m just gonna go off somewhere and eat 64 slices of American cheese.