Films That Time Forgot

Xtro (1983)

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Reviewed by Keith Phipps
April 9th, 2003

In Xtro, young Simon Nash has a lot of problems. He lives in the grayest part of England known to humanity. His mother (Bernice Stegers) has taken up with American photographer Danny Brainin. His French au pair, future Bond girl Maryam d'Abo, wants only to disappear into the bedroom with her boyfriend. He's stuck in a film whose title makes no sense. And his dad, Philip Sayer, has been taken into outer space by aliens. Three years after the disappearance, Nash is still dreaming of his father, who suddenly returns, looking like a shaved dog and terrorizing countryside motorists near the young man's home. While Nash walks in on Stegers and Brainin during an intimate moment, his beastly father engages in his own form of intimacy by raping a local woman, impregnating her, and emerging from her womb, all in a matter of hours. After chewing through his own umbilical cord, the now-human-looking Sayer cleans up and pays his old family an awkward visit, much to Nash's delight and Stegers' confusion. The paternal bonding takes a turn for the moist and icky when Nash walks in on Sayer eating syrup oozing from his own wrist, but Sayer quickly puts his son's fears to rest in the only way he knows how: by biting him, causing an ugly pustule to swell from his shoulder. From there on out, it's like father, like son, as Nash summons up both an evil, dwarfish clown (future Ewok Peter Mandell) and a life-sized army-man action figure, which begins terrorizing Nash's downstairs neighbor. While his parents attempt to patch up their differences with a weekend in the country, Nash makes plans for d'Abo. Turning an unenthusiastic game of hide-and-seek into a lively round of impregnate-the-au pair-with-alien-seedlings, Nash proves he's a chip off the old block. As the domestic chaos mounts, Steger finally suspects there's something amiss when Sayer sheds his skin and collects Nash for a return to the stars, leaving Steger with a bathtub full of alien spawn and everyone else puzzled as to why an alien would need a dwarf in a clown costume to do his dirty work.

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