XTRO

   Film (1982). Ashley Productions/Amalgamated Film Enterprises. Dir Harry Bromley Davenport, starring Bernice Stegers, Philip Sayer, Danny Brainin, Simon Nash, Maryam D'Abo. Screenplay Iain Cassie, Robert Smith, based on a screenplay by Michel Parry, Davenport. 86 mins. Colour.

   UK sf/ HORROR exploitation movie in which a man is kidnapped by a UFO. 3 years later the UFO returns, an ALIEN gets out and rapes a nearby woman, who that samenight gives birth (disgustingly) to a fully grown man, the same man who was kidnapped in the first place. He goes home, infects his son with alien spores; the son uses new telekinetic powers to murder a neighbour with his animated toy clown, and then wraps the au pair girl in a cocoon, where she metamorphoses and produces eggs; meanwhile the husband, making love to his wife, starts visibly to decay. Generally and probably justly panned by the critics, this post- CRONENBERG movie still has something to offer for connoisseurs of bargain-basement Surrealism, some of the wholly arbitrary sequences being carried off quite startlingly. In a spirit of total randomness the director shot 2 endings. The film release has father and son leaving in the UFO, while wife discovers multiple clones of son all saying "Mummy!" The videotape version has wife being murdered by a thing from an egg the au pair laid.

   PN