Xtro

Some movies follow the rules. Xtro doesn’t even know the rules exist.

Here’s the setup: Dad gets abducted by aliens while playing catch with his kid. Three years later, a woman gets violated by a creature that’s part dog, part crab, all nightmare. She wakes up confused. Her belly swells. She dies giving birth to a full-grown man. It’s Dad, slick with blood and afterbirth, and he wants his son back.

If that sounds insane, you’re not ready for the second half.

Director Harry Bromley Davenport takes what could’ve been a cheap Quatermass knockoff and pushes it into fever-dream territory. The film operates on nightmare logic—the kind where a child’s toy soldier comes to life and bayonets someone through a couch. Where a father eats snake eggs to survive. Where alien infection looks less like science fiction and more like a Cronenberg body-horror nightmare.

The creature effects work. That first alien moves with unsettling joint angles that crawl under your skin. The birth scene rivals Alien for sheer squirm factor. When Sam “infects” his son with that grotesque proboscis, it’s not just gross—it’s fundamentally disturbing in ways big-budget films rarely achieve.

What separates Xtro from exploitation trash is its originality. Even in the throw-away bits. Watch how a victim is discovered: a fender-bender bumps her car, and she slumps forward, lifeless. No expensive effects. Just a performer who understands death, and a director willing to try something new.

The plot leaves questions. Lots of them. But when you’re watching a kid use alien powers to torment his downstairs neighbor and turn the au pair into an extraterrestrial incubator, you stop caring about logic. You’re in the grip of something primal.

This is basement filmmaking with mansion ambitions. The budget shows. The actors are green. Davenport was practically a novice. By every reasonable metric, Xtro should collapse under its own ambitions.

Instead, it soars. Nobody told these filmmakers they couldn’t pull this off, so they did. It’s bonkers. It’s brilliant. It’s proof that sometimes, the rules don’t matter.