As I have discussed in the last blog on here, there are a bunch of very strange films from the 80’s that revolve around rape and impregnation of human women by inhuman monsters, in particular, aliens, such as The Beast Within, Inseminoid, Breeders, and Humanoids from the Deep). When I wrote a review of two such films of this kind, I started getting lots of hits from people looking up phrases like “raped by a monster” and “raped by alien videos”. I’d like to clarify that I am not necessarily a fan of such films. I initially reviewed such films as cinematic curiosities. Xtro is another clear example of the genre. It is a bizarre, sick, gross little piece of shock cinema. Its also kind of boring, doesn’t make very much sense, and is likely a waste of your time. It does have the infamous scene where a woman gives birth to a full grown man. So that you don't have to watch the whole film, here it is!
Xtro’s plotline in general is there is a young boy whose father is abducted by aliens. He’s been gone for three years, his mother has a new lover. An alien comes down to earth and a worm comes out of his body and infects or impregnates a women who is instantly pregnant and gives birth to the father that was abducted. I am not making this up. Then the father returns to the house. The human interactions in this film make as little sense as the sci-fi bits, he comes home, tells his wife he doesn’t remember where he was for the last three years, and starts living with the Mom, the kid and her new boyfriend. They also have a sexy French nanny, who they eventually show getting similar treatment as the woman who gave birth to the grown man. The father tells the son that he has been living on another planet and that they had to change him so that he could live there. There’s something about the father causing the son to transform as well. The kid appears to have strange psychic powers. There’s part where the father eats eggs laid by the kids pet snake. It doesn’t make much sense. The son’s toy solider turns life-size and kills the old woman downstairs. The father turns into monster at the end, spaceship arrives and takes the son and the kid away, there’s a final scene that doesn’t really follow any logic that has the mother with the worm type thing that impregnated the woman towards the beginning of the film.
I really don’t know what to say about the phenomena of raped and impregnated by aliens films from the 80’s. I don’t quite honestly understand what motivates the fascination with them that I’m learning more and more a lot of people have. Perhaps male sexual frustration, especially male sexual frustration is expressing itself in a kind of grotesque fantasy. Maybe there is more to it then that. Xtro is kind of boring and hard top sit through, I felt. I feel the same about Insemenoid, but I’d be willing to give Inseminoid another watch at some point because I’ve seen other films by the same director Norman J. warren receantly that I felt to be decent films. In particular Xtro and Insemenoid have a kind of dead seriousness about them as well. It's as though these directors thought they were doing something deeply profound when they made these low-budget rape and impregnated by space alien jerk-off flicks that sat in the back of video stores in the 80’s.
There are a Xtro 2 and a Xtro 3, but apparently they have little or nothing to do plot-wise with the original Xtro. Xtro can exist on its own as a unique moment in cinema.
A film that belongs roughly in the same category of 80’s shock cinema but a far superior film is Forbidden World, also released under the title Mutant from the same year as Xtro. Forbidden World is in many ways a low budget rip-off of the Movie Alien, but it’s an interesting variation on Alien. Forbidden World is infamous for its ending in which the monster is killed by eating the liver of someone with cancer at the end. The film is actually set up so that roughly makes sense. The idea is there is base on an alien planet where genetic research is being done to create a food source for the human race through genetically engineering bacteria that grows rapidly. The results are good but they’ve got a monster running around the station which is revealed to be the result of mixing human DNA with the bacterial DNA. It is a lot like Alien with this beastie whose design is a clear plagiarism of Alien running around killing off the crew. One of the geneticist is clearly sick through out the film, later revealed to have cancer. The mutant creature doesn’t simply eat the crew, he sort of slimes them and sort of incorporates the human DNA to create his own food source-very weird. But then at the end which makes total sense, they feed the liver of the geneticist with cancer to the monster, he incorporates the cancer. It does actually make sense in the film. Cancer is a sensitive topic -my mother passed away from it-but that’s kind of a clever plotline actually. The other thing about this film is there is plenty of nudity and sex that appears for no reason that has anything to do with the plot directly. There’s the scene where the monster kills the women by shoving a tentacle between her legs and up through her back, but at least in this film she didn’t have to go through impregnation.
Both films of course have two notes on a synth and early drum machine beats for a soundtrack. Love those 80's!
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