Gosti iz galaksije (1981)

... aka: Gäste aus der Galaxis (Guest from the Galaxy)

... aka: Monstrum z galaxie Arkana (A Monster from the Arkana Galaxy)

... aka: Visitor from Galaxy

... aka: Visitors from the Galaxy

... aka: Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy

Directed by:

Dušan Vukotić

Hotel desk clerk / budding science fiction writer Robert Novak (Žarko Potočnjak) is busy working on a novel tentatively titled "Monster from the Arkana Galaxy." Too busy, if you asked his frustrated hairdresser girlfriend Biba (Lucie Žulová), who's feeling neglected now that he's so focused on his writing and annoyed at the bizarre changes in her boyfriend, like his wearing a plastic astronaut helmet to get the creative sci-fi juices flowing. Robert's latest opus involves the inhabitants of the Planet Tugador, Tugadorians if you will, who live deep within a distant galaxy called Arkana. With their godlike powers and advanced technology, the aliens are able to easily traverse the universe and now have their sights set on exploring Earth. White-haired, laser-eyed Village of the Damned-style child aliens Targo and Ulu, along with their statuesque robot helper Andra, decide to take their ship out to snoop around our planet. And that's where Robert has left off thus far. He may have gotten a little further if he wasn't constantly interrupted by Biba, his photographer neighbor Toni (Ljubiša Samardžić) and Toni's overbearing mother (Věra Kalendová), whose latest life-shattering crisis involves Toni's dislike of her dog.

Late one night while he's recording parts of his book to add a new monster "toy" character to help with the book's commercial appeal, strange voices come over Robert's tape recorder. They announce themselves as Ulu and Andra, and they ask him to meet them on a nearby island. Robert borrows Toni's boat and heads on over. He then follows a flashing blue light and, low and behold, Andra (Ksenia Prohaska), Ulu (Jasminka Alic), the bratty Targo (Rene Bitorajac) and his toy (called "Mumu"), are all there, having somehow managed to materialize in the real world. When Mumu transforms into a big monster that looks like a mutant, patchwork elephant / anteater, Robert runs off, hops in the boat, takes off and immediately goes and seeks professional help.

During a consultation with a psychiatrist, Robert tells a bizarre story about when he was a baby and willed his widowed father to grow breasts and feed him when they ran out of milk. It seems Robert may possess the rare gift of "telurgy," a term in parapsychology referring to an individual whose will is so strong they can create something material out of nothing. Robert even manages to will a copy of his book into existence, only the pages are blank because the story is still being written as we speak. The aliens continue to communicate with him over his recorder. Robert can't tell if he's losing his mind. He asks Biba to accompany him to the island, where she soon becomes a believer herself when they run across the aliens, robot and their blue spherical spacecraft. They also get a demonstration of the alien's powers when they reverse time, remove the island caretaker's heart and temporarily shrink Biba to cube form.

Despite being Robert's creation, the emotionless aliens are quick to diminish him as lesser. He's merely a mammal; primitive, on the lower end of both the evolutionary scale and consciousness and one who wastes too much energy on emotion. Either way, he asks them to stay on the island for the time being. However, word quickly gets around town that aliens are there, causing both curiosity and a panic. A kid finds an alien finger and throws it into a meat grinder. Toni wants to get pictures of them to help his photography career. Townspeople scour the caves looking for them and strip off all their clothes to prove to them they aren't carrying weapons. After the aliens blow up a boat, they come to the mainland to live with Robert. Andra tries to prove her credentials as a domestic with her vacuum cleaner arm attachment and ability to generate food in her stomach and squirt coffee and cream from her fingertips. Just touching her creates feelings of ecstasy. Perhaps having them around won't be so bad after all. On second though...

Targo screws everything up by slipping Mumu into Biba's bag, which she then brings back to her apartment building. It transforms into a monster, kills both of her sisters (after squirting green slime all over them) and then makes its way downstairs where it crashes a wedding reception, decapitates several people (including tearing a head clean off with its tongue), bites off someone's hand with a fanged mouth that sprouts on its stomach (in a bit predating the famous defibrillator scene in Carpenter's THE THING), rips off a leg, crushes a head under its foot and does all kinds of other odd things (including mutating, growing horns and expelling toxic green gas) before setting the whole place on fire using its trunk as a flamethrower! The above somehow manages to be almost completely bloodless, is scored by an oblivious old blind man playing the accordion and is entirely played for laughs.

Bizarre, one-of-a-kind sci-fi / horror parody seems a bit unfocused at times and is all over the place with its tone but it's also imaginative, surreal, often very funny, oddly charming, extremely entertaining and filled with weird, colorful special effects of varying degrees of quality, some of which were done by Czech stop motion master Jan Svankmajer, who also designed the creature. The acting, locations and electronic score from Tomislav Simovic (which is now available on CD) are all very good and genre fans should find plenty to enjoy here.

Vukotic made dozens of short animated films from 1951 until the mid-70s but very few feature films. He was instrumental in helping to form the production company / animation studio Zagreb Film, where he worked for four decades, and won an Academy Award for Best Short Animated Film in 1961 for Surogat / "Ersatz"; becoming the first foreign animator to do so. He'd be nominated a second time for the same award for his 1964 animated short Igra / "The Game". Visitors came late in his career and would be one of his last projects.

While the cult potential for this title is huge, it has yet to get a cleaned up DVD or Blu-ray release. It's also never been officially released in America nor are there any with legit English subtitles (the version I found had fan-made subs). As far as I know, there were only a couple of VHS releases; in Germany (from C&T Videofilm) and Spain (from Polygram Video). It's way past time for someone out there to rescue this from obscurity.

★★★

Xtro (1982)

... aka: Judas Goat
... aka: X-tro
... aka: Xtro, attacco alla Terra (Xtro, Attack on Earth)
... aka: Xtro – Extraterrestre (Xtro – Extraterrestrial)

Directed by:
Harry Bromley Davenport

Leonard Maltin called it “crudely directed,” “guided by gruesomeness” and “overwrought but dull.” In an episode of At the Movies, Roger Ebert labeled it “one of the most mean-spirited and ugly thrillers I've seen in a long time” and added that it “doesn't even qualify as acceptable trash,” while Gene Siskel simply shrugged it off (“garbage is the operative word”) as if he had better things to do with his time. A critic for Time Out was a little more lenient, saying that it's “incompetent enough to be prime drive-in fodder.” Those and countless other extremely negative reviews from nearly every major critic of the day were what greeted this film upon release. None of that really mattered in the long run though as this did fairly well at the box office and on video. Part of that was due to an effective marketing campaign painting it as the antithesis (“Not all extraterrestrials are friendly!”) of one of 1982's biggest family-friendly hits: E.T.. Being part of a wave of similar sci-fi / horror films from the early 80s hoping to cash in on the success of ALIEN (1979) probably didn't hurt matters either. This production is also noteworthy for being produced by Robert Shaye and his then fledgling New Line Cinema; who handled the U.S. distribution. It was one of only two horror releases (the other being the entertaining 1982 slasher ALONE IN THE DARK) that predated their company-stabilizing hit A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).

Since its theatrical days, this has gone on to amass a minor cult following simply because of how bizarre and ridiculous it is. The director, who'd previously made just one feature (1976's Whispers of Fear, which doesn't appear to have ever been released on home video), claims that he and his crew made this for one reason and one reason only - “to shock people” - and didn't really put much more thought into it than that. He's also the first person to admit that the film “doesn't make much sense.” He is correct. Still, that doesn't mean this isn't still wonderfully entertaining.

While outside playing fetch with the dog, Sam Phillips (Philip Sayer) tosses a stick into the air, there's a sudden explosion of bright light and strong wind and the next thing you know he's gone. Sam's young son Tony (Simon Nash) witnesses the whole incident, but nobody believes him. Instead, wife / mom Rachel (Bernice Stegers) thinks Sam has run off and abandoned them and eventually moves on with her own life. Three years later, the mother and son are out of the country and living in a brownstone in the city. Rachel is now dating a new man, girlie photographer Joe Daniels (Danny Brainin), who lives with them along with French housekeeper / nanny Analise (Maryam d'Abo in her film debut). Tony rejects the potential new father figure in his life, is haunted by recurring nightmares and is convinced his father will come back one day. He's right, of course, but pops isn't quite the same once he does finally show up. The boy also has some kind of bizarre, unexplained psychic connection to his long-missing dad, who communicates with him and makes him wake up one covered in blood (“Daddy sent it!”)

A spaceship swings by Earth long enough to drop off a reptilian alien creature. It immediately kills a couple driving through the country and then breaks into a cottage, attaches its tentacle onto a woman's (Susie Silvey) mouth and then impregnates her. Her stomach immediately swells and she gives birth to a full-grown man right then and there. That man is Sam, of course, or at least a being that looks identical to him. Soon after, Sam hunts down and finds Tony and Rachel and claims he has no idea where he was or what he was doing during those three missing years. Since he doesn't have a place to stay, Rachel is pretty much forced to take him in temporarily, which doesn't sit too well with Joe. While there, Sam exhibits some decidedly strange behavior, including eating snake eggs, and then gives his son a nasty hickey that passes along special supernatural / telekinetic abilities to him in the process. The powers also give him a mean / evil streak.

At first, Tony does simple things, like making a top spin with his mind, but then he creates a dwarf clown (Peter Mandell) with a razor blade yo yo and other deadly playthings. Downstairs tenant Mrs. Goodman (Anna Wing) smashes Tony's pet snake to death with a mallet when it sneaks into her apartment, so he turns his tiny soldier doll into a full-sized plastic assassin and sends it downstairs to stab her death with a bayonet. The young and fertile Analise is up next and they have special plans for her. While they send a toy tank that shoots real bullets and a black panther (!!) out to take care of her boyfriend (David Cardy), the clown bludgeons her with a floppy hammer, Tony breaths into her side and next thing we know she's a cocooned incubator pumping out water balloon alien eggs. An elderly neighbor who swings by to check up on them gets his throat cut with the yo yo and there's also death by piercing sound waves, which make a man's ears start gushing blood. A second, skeletal-looking alien creature shows up toward the end. The original ending was changed later on because the distributor didn't like the first one and were planning to remove it.

Was this plot well thought out? No. Does this make much sense? No, not really. Still, Xtro is an extremely entertaining, nicely-photographed, fairly well-acted and efficient little exploitation movie with fun special effects, lots of gore, some sleaze (including several nude scenes from the stunning D'Abo) and many memorably oddball moments worth checking out. The director also co-wrote it and did the (pretty good) synthesizer score. He later came to America and made Xtro II: The Second Encounter (1990) and Xtro 3: Watch the Skies (1995). There was talk of either a third sequel or a remake of the first but that has yet to happen.

Xtro is one of those movies you couldn't avoid even if you tried. It's been very well-distributed since its initial VHS release back in 1983 and continues to be well-distributed to this day with numerous DVD releases. Still waiting on a Blu-ray, though.

★★1/2