... the film on the other hand is something a little less pure.
Here is a film that screams B-Movie haiku, but it is so strange and downright sktitzo that I feel I can justify giving it a few more words and many less hyphens.
X-Tro is a British made sci-fi film released in 1983 to almost universal nothingness – I had never myself even heard of it until it was namechecked by Edgar Wright in an interview – but I bet those people adventurous enough to check it out back then might have very well been blown away, not necessarily for good reasons. Now it plays like a bizarre curio of a bygone era.
The plot as I remember it sees aliens popping down and taking Dad, right in front of his understandably befuddled Kid.
A few years pass with no sign of Dad, and Mum has shacked up with a smarmy new American de-facto photographer and an unbelievably 80s-hot foreign nanny. Any thought of Dad’s alien abduction has been written off as him doing a runner from the family.
But that was all before the arrival of some quite impractical looking slimy puppets – I mean aliens. Aliens who are apparently awesome in the sack and incredibly potent, as an overnight gestation that sees the arrival of a bouncing baby adult Dad suggests.
Within minutes Dad is back on the scene, only with no real clue as to what has taken place over his three year absence, he is nevertheless strangely accommodating to the news that the smarmy Yank is keeping his side of the bed warm, and sets about rebuilding relationships with Mum and Kid.
But even with Dad drawing a blank of the events of the last 1,000 odd days he is indisputably changed, and the fact that Kid is clearly Dad’s little boy seems to trouble no-one but me…
Some of what follows in this mercifully brief flick is childish and silly. Some of it is plain gross. But it’s all fucking nuts. And don’t ask me what X-Tro means.
Final Rating – 3 / 10. There’s a fair chance that you found this review by mistake, an equal chance that you will never hear of X-Tro again. But there are DVDs on ebay for the curious or especially cult-ish. Let me finish by saying this was likely controversial in 1982, now it is just weird.
