Xtro
by Harry Bromley Davenport
List Price:
Our Price: $8.98
You Save: $6.00 (40%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $8.97 (click here)
Category: DVD
See more DVD releases
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
DVD Cover Information
Actor: Danny Brainin, David Cardy, Maryam D'Abo, Robert Austin, Robert FyfeDirector: Harry Bromley Davenport
Brand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 83 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-09-20
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Image Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Xtro
Movie Review: Best Dad on Earth!
Summary: 5 Stars
In the "It followed me home, Mom---can I keep it" camp of storytelling comes XTRO, a little tale of intergalactic parenting that goes to show the lengths some guys will go to to get out of paying child support.
"Xtro" proves that even if you're the ultimate in deadbeat Dads---one who traded the basic patriarchal duties to go intergalactic bar-hopping for a few years with alien abductors---you can always go Home again.
Only: Home might not be exactly what it was. And you might not be exactly the same Dad you were to begin with. And when you get done, Home is going to *definitely* have gone through some radical remodelling.
Call it Home Improvement, E.T.-style.
That's pretty much the raw meat and bloody viscera of "XTRO", a deliciously sick, gloriously gory, considerably raunchy little tale of alien invasion, glistening, silky little alien eggs, bloodsucking parasites, leering circus dwarves, coughing panthers, and one man's quest to secure visiting rights to his estranged son, and the Devil take the consequences!
Whatever you think of XTRO, you've got to admire Sam Phillips's (Philip Sayer)pluck in getting back together with his kid (wee little Simon Nash). For one thing, the flick's relatively sane opener---a scene of Yorkshire domestic bliss, daddy playing outside a rustic cottage with his son---is interrupted by a little fire in the sky, and poof!: XTRO serves up one nasty alien abduction, piping hot!.
Things careen from one level of insanity to another pretty much after that.
Sam, evidently, sustains something considerably more life-changing than an anal probe. Then, two years later, without even phoning home to tell his long-suffering wife "the check's in the mail", he shows up.
Well, sorta.
After a fairly complicated re-entry---you'll know what I'm talking about when I see it---Daddy Sam re-inserts himself in his estranged family's life. I mean, Hell, who can blame the Old Man: he just wants life to be like it was, back before he went on an unscheduled Extraterrestrial Magic Carpet Ride, back before Mommy got a whiny new boyfriend (who, frankly, merits instant destruction: look at it from Sam's viewpoint).
Back before Daddy was so dang seepy and goopy.
Anyway, Sam is back in the future, and before long starts working on building a real Family Nest Egg.
If you know what I mean.
Now: all sarcasm aside, "XTRO" is some pretty demented, outrageous, fairly nauseating filth. If I weren't the jaded, gore-crazed monster I am, I might even have found it fairly disturbing. Strike that: I *do* find it disturbing, especially the fate that descends on hot little Maryam D'Abo, a fate that shouldn't happen to a dog.
It's genuinely scary and creepily repulsive. Take that POV-shot of a car, headed down a dark, mist-shrouded, winding English road: what's that---is something hauling itself through the heather, crawling weakly towards the side of the road? What's that---my God, *that*, in the headlamps!
Or take the way Harry Bromley-Davenport upstages Japanese wildman Takashi Miike by about 20 years with his---umm, unexpected---alien re-entry method. And no, it doesn't involve a space capsule.
Or take the sustained, purposeful nastiness of XTRO: its relentless goopiness, its gleeful obsession with the seminal, the fluid, the fact that we human beings are an incredibly messy species, and the myriad ways in which a fiendish alien intelligence could take advantage of this to spread the spores, so to speak.
XTRO likes webbing. And things that spit. And bile, and pus, of course: and most of all slimy extrusions. Oh, and Eggs. Definitely Eggs.
Really, this should serve as warning: I can't get over just how unrelentingly disgusting XTRO is.
The extra features include an embarrassed interview with the director, Bromley-Davenport: it's evident that he felt he was meant for better things, and that he was slumming it with XTRO. Which is a pity, too: a glance at his subsequent career (from the IMDB) shows that he had it exactly backwards, and should have staked his ground deep in horror territory---if XTRO was achieved more by accident than by design, as Bromley-Davenport claims, then the man had a rare gift for horror.
At any rate, posterity has this marvellous little gem---erm, egg---to delight, repulse, confound, and horrify. It's actually scary, which can't be said about many flicks. And for those seriously deadbeat dads out there scraping bottom on excuses for not getting the child-support, it's inspirational!
Oh: and for anyone with a sensitive psyche, XTRO might very well blast your sanity.
JSG
Summary of Xtro
XTRO - DVD MovieSimilar DVD Movies
The Beast WithinRelease date: 2001-08-28; DVD
Best price: $6.80
Price in other shops:
Zombie (2-Disc Ultimate Edition)Koch International; Release date: 2011-10-24; DVD
Best price: $14.89
Price in other shops:
From Beyond (Unrated Director's Cut)TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT; Release date: 2007-09-11; DVD
Best price: $12.90
Price in other shops:
![Humanoids From The Deep [Roger Corman's Cult Classics] Image](/images/Humanoids-From-The-Deep-Roger-Corman-Cult-Classics-B00317LM9W-X.jpg){kind=small}
Humanoids From The Deep [Roger Corman's Cult Classics]Universal Studios; Release date: 2010-08-03; DVD
Best price: $12.78
Price in other shops:
Forbidden World (Roger Corman's Cult Classics)Universal Studios; Release date: 2010-07-20; DVD
Best price: $10.99
Price in other shops:
The StuffIMG; Release date: 2011-09-20; DVD
Best price: $5.72
Price in other shops:
Nightmare: 30th Anniversary EditionCODE RED ENT.; Release date: 2011-07-26; DVD
Best price: $14.49
Price in other shops:
Basket Case (20th Anniversary Special Edition)VANHENTENRYCK/SMITH; Release date: 2001-07-17; DVD
Best price: $4.68
Price in other shops:
HumongousRelease date: 2011-11-15; DVD
Best price: $10.25
Price in other shops:
The Deadly SpawnRelease date: 2004-10-26; Published: 2004-10-01; DVD
Best price: $10.99
Price in other shops: