This Movie Rules
Xtro

Xtro

Some extra-terrestrials aren't friendly.
Science Fiction
Horror

Release: 1982

Runtime: 86 minutes

Director: Harry Bromley Davenport

Production: Amalgamated Film Enterprises

Tony's father Sam, abducted by aliens three years earlier, returns to earth and seeks out his wife and son, but Rachel has since been living with Joe and the reunion is awkward. Joe doesn't trust Sam, and Rachel can't quite decide what her feelings are for her two men. Sam is not the same as when he left, and he begins affecting Tony in frightening ways.

Review

Xtro is the kind of science fiction nightmare that crawls into your brain and refuses to leave. It is part alien abduction chiller, part body-horror freakout, and all fever dream. The film does not simply flirt with bad taste, it dives headfirst into it, splashing around in imagery so strange and unsettling that you start to question your own grip on reality. The story begins with a father vanishing in a flash of otherworldly light, only to return years later changed in ways that defy nature. What follows is a parade of bizarre births, surreal transformations, and moments so jaw-droppingly odd they could only have come from the untamed corners of 80s British genre filmmaking. It is as if a UFO crash-landed in a horror film and the wreckage was spliced together with dreams pulled from the wrong side of the human mind. Xtro does not waste time on exposition or explanations. It moves with the logic of a nightmare, where every turn reveals something more disturbing than the last. One moment you are in a quiet country home, the next you are watching an alien organism invade, gestate, and emerge in scenes that feel both obscene and hypnotic. The practical effects are the stars here, oozing, pulsating, and stretching in ways that defy polite description. Combined with a score that hums with electronic menace, the whole film becomes an oppressive, skin-crawling experience. This is not safe science fiction. This is not comfort horror. Xtro is exploitation cinema at its most surreal and unnerving, a film that invites you into the darkness with a grin and then shows you something you will never forget.