Xtro
Entry updated 25 September 2017. Tagged: Film.
Film (1982). Ashley Productions/Amalgamated Film Enterprises. Directed by Harry Bromley Davenport. Written by Iain Cassie, Robert Smith, based on a screenplay by Michel Parry, Davenport. Cast includes Danny Brainin, Maryam d'Abo, Simon Nash, Philip Sayer and Bernice Stegers. 86 minutes. Colour.
UK sf/Horror exploitation movie in which a man, Sam Phillips (Sayer), is kidnapped by a UFO. Three years later the UFO returns to plant a seed from which a semi-human Alien develops, commits a couple of murders and rapes a nearby woman, who that same night gives birth (gorily and disgustingly) to a fully grown man, apparently the same Sam Phillips who was abducted in the first place. He goes home, infects his son Tony (Nash) with alien spores; the son uses new telekinetic Psi Powers to murder a neighbour with his animated toy clown, and then wraps the au pair girl (d'Abo) in a cocoon, where she metamorphoses and produces eggs; meanwhile the husband, making love to his wife Rachel (Stegers), starts visibly to decay. Further unpleasantness follows.
Generally and probably justly panned by the critics, this post-Cronenberg movie still has something to offer for connoisseurs of bargain-basement Surrealism, some of the wholly arbitrary sequences being carried off quite startlingly. In keeping with the spirit of total randomness, the director shot two endings. The film release was to have had the father (now transformed into alien shape) and son leaving in the UFO, while the wife returns home to discover multiple Clones of her son all saying "Mummy!" This scene was cut by executive producer Robert Shaye for the New York premiere. For subsequent release and the videotape version, Davenport added another ending in which the wife is murdered by a replica of the earlier alien rapist, apparently grown from an egg the au pair laid. [PN/DRL]
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