31 Days of Halloween - Day 30: Xtro

For the last few years I always do a 31 days of Halloween month. The past few years I re-read all the original Goosebumps books and before that I'd watch 31 horror movies. However I realized every single time I watched 31 Horror movies I exclusively picked ones I enjoyed. I decided to do something slightly different. I composed a list of every horror movie I owned and put them in alphabetical order. Then using a random number generator I generated 31 numbers and watched the movies that corresponded with those numbers. Some are great films and others… well… are less than fun let's say. I hope you enjoy!

Day 30: Xtro (Movie #509)

Xtro was one of those films I always read about on Horror Sites but could never find. My local video stores all seemed to have only purchased the sequels for some reason. It wasn't until about two years ago when I bought the double disc DVD of Xtro 1 and 2 that I finally saw the movie.

Going into rewatching this the only thing I remembered about the movie was the infamous birthing scene. Alien has it's chest-burster which terrified me as a kid (when I saw it parodied in Spaceballs) but it holds nothing to watching a woman give birth to a full grown man. It's so gross and disturbing that you simply have to applaud the film as whole for that moment alone. That being said, there's a lot to applaud with this movie.

There's no downtime in this movie. Not a single second of it's running time is wasted. It starts off with the alien abduction of a boy's father, we jump to three years later instantly with the boy having nightmares and bleeding all over his bed (but not his blood) and by ten minutes we're introduced to an awesome practical effect alien and the insane birthing sequence I mentioned earlier. 

I'll stop beating around the bush. This movie was fucking awesome. I don't know how I forgot how awesome it was. In fact as soon as I finish writing this I'm going to rewatch parts 2 and 3 and see how they hold up.  

So closing notes. Watch this. It's probably my favorite film I watched this month. 

Matt Kelly is the host of the popular podcast The Saint Mort Show, a frequent contributor to Geekscape.net, the founder of Chords for Cures and the co-writer/co-director of the upcoming comedy Describing the Moon. He also loves it when people surprise him with purchases from his Amazon Wishlist… just saying.