Director/Producer – Harry Bromley-Davenport, Screenplay – Daryl Haney, Story – Harry Bromley-Davenport & Daryl Haney, Producers – Michael Biber & Harry Bromley-Davenport, Photography – Irv Goodnoff, Music – Van Rieben, Digital Visual Effects – Zero Gravity, Digital Effects Supervisor – Paul Sammon, Creature Design/Effects – Modus FX (Supervisor – David Barton), Production Design – Wendy Guidery. Production Company – Dorian Inc.
Cast
Sal Landi (Lieutenant Martin Kirn), Andrew Divoff (Captain Fetterman), Karen Moncrieff (J.G. Watkins), David M. Parker (Private Dermot Reilly), Andrea Lauren Herz (Corporal Banta), Jim Hanks (Private Friedman), Daryl Haney (Private Hendricks), Virgil Frye (Survivor), Robert Culp (Guardino), Jeanne Mori (Erica Stern)
Plot
John is a crew member aboard the Odyssey 1, a three-man expedition to explore the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, is woken from cryogenic sleep. They have been warned that the drugs used in the hypersleep process can have side effects, including creating paranoia and hallucinations. The ship experiences turbulence and shaking. The crewmember Nash believes that something has been damaged, although no evidence of this can be found. Nash becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea of turning the ship around before they reach the gravity-assisted slingshot around Jupiter. However, this means conducting a mutiny against the captain Franks who insists they stay on course. John cannot be sure whether to believe Nash’s warnings or this is a side effect of the drugs. At the same time, John begins to reminisce back to before the launch and his relationship with Zoe Morgan, one of the astronaut trainers, and how he misses her. He then begins to think he sees Zoe on board the ship and cannot be sure if he too is hallucinating.
This was the third of the Xtro films. The series began with British director Harry Bromley-Davenport’s Xtro (1982), an enterprising copy of Alien (1979) that boasted an outlandish design for the creature. Bromley-Davenport then made Xtro II: The Second Encounter (1991), followed by Xtro3, sometimes called Xtro 3: Watch the Skies, although not on the credits of the film. As with the rest of the series, Xtro3 has no relation to any of the other films.
Xtro3 was released not long after tv’s The X Files (1993-2002, 2016-8) premiered and the fascination it created with Roswell, the supposed US government cover-up of the existence of aliens and so on. The same year as Xtro3 came out there was also the Alien Autopsy video hoax. Whereas the first two Xtro films were copies of the whole monster amok formula of Alien, Xtro3 is located very much in The X Files territory and sits atop that whole late 1990s conspiratorial mindset about UFOs and government cover-up.
The main problem with Xtro3 is that not a lot happens. The group of misfit soldiers arrive on the island, there are occasional scenes where people are killed. In the latter half, far more time is given over to the threat posed by Andrew Divoff’s captain and his men than to the alien. The alien remains far too vague a menace, only occasionally popping up out amid some not very good digital invisibility camouflage. There’s also a spider web threat that kills a couple of people.
The alien attacks
Crucially what there is lacking is an Alien or Predator (1987)-like threat where the alien is hunting the soldiers. Harry Bromley-Davenport borrows the basics of The Dirty Dozen (1967) in the early scenes recruiting a bunch of misfits and screw-ups, although in this case they seem so careless and anti-authoritarian you would be questioning the sanity of anybody who would consider employing the group.
Outside of the Xtro series, British-born Harry Bromley-Davenport has made a handful of other films, including the black comedy Life Among the Cannibals (1996); the children’s film Waking Up Horton/The Adventures of Young Brave (1998) about the returned spirit of an Indian medicine man; Mockingbird Don’t Sing (2001), the true story of an adult woman who was treated like an animal; and the ghost story Darkness Visible/Haunted Echoes (2008).
In an interesting trivia note, Karen Moncrieff, who plays one of the soldiers, did go on to her own directorial career with The Dead Girl (2006) and The Keeping Hours (2017), among other works.
