In a 2005 interview, director Harry Bromley Davenport describes his 1983 film, Xtro, in plain terms. “There is nothing to [his film] at all,” he says in the DVD featurette. “It’s rubbish.” Davenport’s blunt self-deprecation isn’t entirely fair. Xtro isn’t a good movie by any means, but the Madison Library’s “Bad Cinema” program sees some value in what Roger Ebert once described on an episode of At the Movies as “a depressing and completely cheerless exercise.” All due respect to Mr. Ebert, I must disagree.
Xtro wastes no time as absentee father Sam (Philip Sayer) is abducted by an alien spacecraft when a stick he tosses into the sky appears to tear a hole through time and/or space and/or my own grip of reality. Three years after his abduction, an alien seed crashes back to the family farm, hatches, and then impregnates an unsuspecting young woman via mouth insemination. (You’re on your own Googling that one, folks.) The woman promptly gives birth to Sam, who returns to the son (Simon Nash) and wife (Bernice Stegers, the younger spitting image of Dead Alive‘s Elizabeth Moody) he left being to bring them back to wherever the hell planet Sam came from.
Sloppily constructed and incoherently told, Xtro is a strange artifact of budget 80s cinema. A synth-infatuated score, composed by Davenport himself, exterminates the director’s half-hearted attempts at crafting atmosphere, so much that it bludgeons the viewer away from any thrills. But what New Line Cinema’s unprofitable venture lacks in nearly everything, it makes up for in impudence. A pet snake’s eggs are eaten whole, Tony’s night terrors end in pools of blood, all while clowns and giant toy soldiers spring to life and kill people. The alien itself is genuinely unsettling in its unnatural gait — a mime was allegedly hired to dress in costume and crawl on his back — and the boundaries Xtro pushes are so depraved and so random, it’s less a “cheerless exercise” than a picture whose worst qualities become its best.
- “Bad Cinema” presents Xtro FREE Thursday night at 6:30p in Rm 302 at the Central Library.