This Nightmarish Version of ‘ET The Extra-Terrestrial’ Contains the Most Brutal Sci-Fi You Can Stream

Believe us: there are few things that you can put on your retinas comparable to ‘Xtro‘, an evil and perverse film that came out of the VHS catacombs of the eighties and that now recover Filmin in a juicy restored edition. For many years it was known as an unhealthy cross between ‘ET the Extra-Terrestrial’, ‘Alien’ and ‘Invaders from Mars’, but its production year, 1982, suggests that Spielberg’s film had not even been released.

In it we will learn a story worthy of generational melodrama: a family man disappears without a trace, although his son claims that he did it when a great flash appeared in the sky. Years later, the man reappears, but his wife, who has begun to rebuild her life, he suspects that there is something dark in that return. However, his son is excited about his father’s return.

Of course, as we know early on in the movie, the father’s body is actually being used by an alien intelligence with a plan. At the moment, he infiltrates the family by posing as the human. Sounds familiar? Well, even if you’ve seen this plot a million times, they haven’t told it to you this way: with a texture that is in tune with the most brutal B-series horror movies of the eighties, the one that came directly from Italy, Spain and Germany, this British rarity is shot with a dreamlike texture and demonic clown sequences that are more reminiscent of ‘Phantasma’ than ‘Alien’.

Incredibly strange monsters, an instantaneous birth scene that traumatized more than one eighties child, modest but extremely ingenious special effects and, above all, a nightmarish logic that turns the film into a bizarre artie piece of extreme horror that dialogues, of all things, with a recent film that is also unclassifiable, like ‘Under the Skin’. A devastating and unrepeatable piece halfway between exploitation and auteur cinema that simply cannot be compared to any other alien invasion film from the eighties.