10 Great Sci-Fi Horror Movies (No One Ever Talks About)
4. Xtro
Released in 1982, British sci-fi horror Xtro can boast the impressive feat of being one of the weirdest video nasties.
This creepy and inventive alien film brought grotesque body horror to English suburbia, in its bizarre story of a returning astronaut who brings with him a monstrous alien growth.
In a plot that the later flop The Astronaut's Wife essentially lifted, the film sees this British astronaut return to his wife who has moved on in the years since his disappearance and shacked up with a new bloke.
And if what's left of our heroic astronaut isn't annoyed, you can bet the titular alien inhabiting his body is.
What follows is a surreal, dream-like tale of this alien-possessed father attempting to take back his son from his mother's protection via all manner of telepathy, toy-possessing, inventive slasher-style kills, and eventually outright body horror.
Odder than most of the Alien rip-offs of the early eighties, this one succeeds by grounding its human drama in something resembling realism, whilst making its sequences of surreal horror bizarre and impossible-to-follow. The result is a uniquely hallucinatory viewing experience.