Streaming Availability: N/A (but you'll find it if you know where to look)
"I'm not the same as before . . . I went to another world. I had to be changed so I could live there."
This is all deeply fucked. Just letting you know up top.
The last six days have all been major studio films with cutting-edge effects. Any return to the grubby world of low-budget B-movies will feel strange. Xtro, however, is a uniquely bizarre thing: nasty, exploitative, hallucinatory. A lot of horror movies have the feeling of a really bad dream, that's a cliche, but I'll use it anyway. Xtro is full of confusing, unpleasant imagery that almost adds up to something like a cogent point, but whatever it is just keeps escaping you. The director, Harry Bromley Davenport, has very little good to say about it, comparing Xtro unfavorably to a similarly surreal horror movie, Phantasm. He describes his movie as having "an atmosphere of complete moronity and incapability, stupidity". I definitely cannot agree there. Xtro is onto something, we might find out just what if we can remember enough of the nightmare to figure it out.
I cannot believe half the month has passed and I have not really delved into the mysticism of UFOs. There has not been an alien abduction yet in any of the movies - until now! A core part of these experience is their vagueness, their unexplainably, their irrationality. Aliens have so often been the extreme end of science, with UFO abductions science has so surpassed human understanding that these abduction narratives have the same chilling feel as any other kind of mystical experience. If you've been taken to see God or see little green men, it is terrifying. Reported cases of abduction will start taking off in the Sixties. These stories will grow as more and more scholarship (and fiction) is dedicated to the events. By the time Xtro comes out there is more and more unreliable techniques being used in the "science" of UFOlogy, such as hypnotism and regression therapies, the exact crap that allowed mass-paranoia about Satanic cults to build up across America. Xtro's narrative does not fit into any of the established mythologies of UFOs, but it does fit well into the surreal nature of these experiences.
Pay attention to this place. I need to get into the Whitley Striebers of this world before this month is out. Communion is coming up.
Xtro is an extreme abduction case where Sam (Philip Sayer), an English father is suddenly taken while out on holiday with his son, and disappears for three years. This movie is going to be unclear about most of its details, down even to the question whether the original human Sam ever actually returns. Is what comes back Sam, an alien pretending to be Sam, or an alien that thinks it is Sam? Whatever this Sam-thing is, it seems driven by two contradictory, maybe tragically contradictory goals. The human part of "Sam" wants to get his family back. His wife Rachel (Bernice Stegers) has moved in with a bitchy American photographer, Joe (Danny Brainin), and is trying to raise her precocious son, Tony (Simon Nash). Sam wants back into Rachael and Tony's lives, a divorced dad narrative. However, the alien-Sam is following horrifying biological imperatives to procreate. Tony will be central to that process. Any read of this film cannot avoid the chilling implications of child abuse. You just need to confront that, it is part of the horror of Xtro.
We've seen plenty of alien films, but no matter how strange and disturbing the extraterrestrials were, we've mostly understood what they are, what they want. The Thing is awful, but all it wants is to eat the world, simple enough. Whatever is happening in Xtro is much weirder. The life cycle process of these creatures seems to complete itself, but is not purely a biological one either. There is a psychic or spiritual element to it too. The Sam-thing seems to actually "win".
Well, I have to get into the gruesome details eventually so buckle up. Xtro is a cheap creature feature but far from an ineffective one. What effects they have they use brilliantly for awful imagery.
What will become Sam is at first a quadrupedal creature bent-backwards, seemingly crab-walking as it murders and violates people. A young woman has some kind of appendage attached to her mouth, Xtro is one of the dozens of films picking up the rape implications of Ridley Scott's Alien. She then gives birth to a full-grown man, Sam, covered in afterbirth - and since Xtro never shies away from the nasty, we get to see Sam bite through his own umbilical cord. Sam, manages to keep up a human form for most of the remaining film, but his inhuman parts keep coming to the surface. His first attempt to call Rachel causes a phone receiver to melt. He eats snake eggs and sucks on natural gas lines. Tony, meanwhile, awakes covered in blood the night his father is reborn. Later, Sam will infect his son by kissing his flesh, pouring some kind of material into Tony's shoulder. From there, Tony too is increasingly less human, gaining powers to bring his toys to life, murdering some neighbors. All the time, Rachel is trying to hold together what's left of her family. Until by the end, the flesh is melting off her loved ones as they are once again taken up into space.
Also, the Bond Girl au pair (Maryam d'Abo) gets turned into an egg-laying husk as well. The young woman is sexually active, and Rachel is openly sexually active, still something of a social taboo for a mother. Tony is constantly intruding on the adult women in his life having sex. It is hard to read Simon Nash's performance, most of the time he is shot to be the Creepy Little Kid. We see a lot of his imagination come to life, and this is a full-sized plastic soldier marching robotically to kill. This does not really give us much interiority to him though, except that we know he likes creepy clowns. The conflict around Tony seems to be a confrontation with adult sexuality that Tony cannot yet process. Xtro luridly points the camera at Maryam d'Abo's breasts in many scenes but also this movie seems terrified of sex at every turn. No part of it seems pleasant, it is a biological imperative that controls the women in this film into terrible relationships, similar to whatever inhuman instincts are controlling Sam. Maybe what's happening here is Tony confronting adulthood and rejecting it, living instead in an unreal world of play and fog machines.
I cannot help but notice the similarities Xtro has to a Spanish movie also from 1983, Pod People, AKA Extra Terrestrial Visitors. MST3K would feature it years later, and it also a weird mixture of killer aliens and magical children's delight. I cannot imagine MST3K could ever feature Xtro. It is just too extreme and unsettling to riff over.
There have been a lot of bleak movies this month, Xtro beats Alien³ and The Thing for bleakness. This is shot in England, and there is a just a terrible grayness to everything from that Thatcher-era. The skies are full of gloom, the streets are full of urban decay, and the post-Empire misery has really set in. Probably the true heroine of Xtro in the end is Rachel, a woman approaching middle age, bouncing between two awful men and a son whom she is disconnected with. Her hair is always messy. And for no sin of her own, she watches everything in her life melt away into unknowable chaos. She reconnects with her ex-husband and the guy oozes away into a corpse while he's fucking her. And then she too is devoured by it. The End.
So if you want a brutal and deeply disturbingly alien movie, you do not get much worse than Xtro. It's unique, it's unforgettable. A lot of these movies following Alien just wanted to tear off women's shirts and indulge in rape fantasies. Xtro is not any less exploitative but it is surreal and bitter in fascinating ways.
There are two movies listed as sequels to Xtro, Xtro 2 and Xtro 3 which came out in the Nineties. They are fully in-name-only, just two more movies Bromley Davenport directed about aliens. I have not seen them and nobody ever talks about them, so they're probably not good. I am not going to repeat the mistake of watching Children of the Damned again. But if they're secretly masterpieces, let me know.
Next time! You like musicals, right? You loved Joker 2, right? Well, even if you hate musicals, too damn bad, next movie is Little Shop of Horrors!
No comments:
Post a Comment