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cult
Director
Harry Bromley Davenport
Year
1983
Country
UK
Runtime
81 min

Also released as

  • Xtro, attacco alla Terra
  • Estranhas Metamorfoses
  • X-Tro
  • X-Tro 1

Filed under

Xtro

A British alien-abduction film so incoherent and disturbing it has never been fully explained, by anyone, including its director.

A man abducted by aliens returns three years later, transformed, and reconnects with his young son by infecting him. What follows makes no linear sense: a woman gives birth to a full-grown man, toys come to life and kill, a nanny is cocooned.

Harry Bromley Davenport made a genuine oddity of early-80s British horror: a film assembled from nightmare images with only the loosest connecting logic, and the incoherence is precisely why it has a following.

It is quietly unsettling in the way a bad dream is, because it refuses to obey cause and effect, and several of its images, the clown, the panther, the birth, are hard to shake.

There are multiple endings across different cuts, none of which resolve anything.

It is not good in a conventional sense and it is strange, which is a rarer and more valuable thing.

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The sleeves

The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.

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EN · poster
EN · poster

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