The “painful to watch” 1983 sci-fi movie so awful Roger Ebert said it “gives movies a bad name”
Most of the time, you’ll know you’re watching a bad movie within seconds, minutes at the most. Unfortunately, Roger Ebert had to sit there until the end credits, so he wasn’t in a position to fuck off once he realised he couldn’t take any more.
Well, he did, but only a few times. Across his lengthy career, there were only a handful of films that the critic walked out of, and there was another that he only managed to get eight minutes into before abandoning ship, although he did admit that one made him feel a little bad.
Considering the number of reviews he wrote stretched into the thousands, it evidently took a special kind of awful to convince him that he’d be better off doing literally anything else with his time. However, after persevering for all 87 minutes, he reached the conclusion that one picture was a blight on cinema.
Not that anyone was expecting a masterpiece, or they shouldn’t have been, with co-writer and director Harry Bromley Davenport’s 1983 sci-fi horror, Xtro, being cobbled together on a budget of $60,000. That meant there was always the possibility it would be shite, and lo and behold, shite it was.
Philip Sayer’s Sam Phillips is abducted by aliens in the opening scene, only to return three years later as something else entirely. After reuniting with his wife and son, who’ve naturally been wondering where the fuck he’s been, he begins a covert mission to turn them into the subjects of his extra-terrestrial overlords.
It doesn’t sound like something that would leave Ebert up in arms, but it did. “Xtro is an ugly, mean-spirited, and despairing thriller that left me thoroughly depressed,” he moaned. “Why was this movie made? What vision filled the filmmakers with a desire to share this work with an audience?”
Sadly, his questions were unanswered, leaving him with no other option but to declare the shoestring schlocker as “the work of incompetent cynics.” As an early 1980s movie with some gnarly special effects, Xtro also flirted with the ‘Video Nasty’ craze, but managed to escape the wrath of the BBFC by making it into British cinemas with an 18 certificate.
Based on how he felt about it, Ebert would have preferred it if it had been wiped from existence instead. “Most exploitation movies are bad, but not necessarily painful to watch,” he mused, but Xtro was something different, a picture he called not only an exception to that rule, but “a completely depressing, nihilistic film, an exercise in sadness.”
He thought it was the drizzling shits, but more than that, Ebert considered Xtro to be an affront to the good name of cinema itself, stating that “it’s movies like this that give movies a bad name.” Harsh? Perhaps, because there are many worse movies out there, but it does underline how much he despised it.
