Xtro 3: Watch the Skies
Bignada, Arizona, 1955, and Biff Atkins confesses that his home movie of an unidentified flying object was a hoax, the nine-year old commended for his honesty: “Like all true Americans, he was willing to admit a mistake when he had to,” a lesson that Captain Fetterman of the CIA is unable to learn forty years later as he leads a team of unwanted soldiers to the island where the second part of the associated cover-up operation was conducted.
The sole survivor of the expedition, in a run-down motel Lieutenant Martin Kim waits for the arrival of television reporter Erica Stern to tell his story, of how he and his team, Corporal Reilly and Privates Banta, Hendricks and Friedman and Fetterman’s adjutant Watkins, were considered expendable, witnesses to the aftermath of experiments on a captured alien specimen which escaped and massacred the scientists, a tale he cannot back up with evidence.
The third and (so far final) in the low-budget series of director Harry Bromley Davenport, Xtro 3: Watch the Skies was released straight to video in late 1995, mere months after the notorious Alien Autopsy hoax it emulates, eight years after the first British film in the sequence with the second standalone feature a Canadian co-production, the third also taking nothing other than the name of the series but this time an American co-production, written by Daryl Haney who also appears as Hendricks, first of the team to die.
Possibly more of a blessed escape than noble self-sacrifice, although Xtro predates The X-Files and Nicholas “Krycek” Lea even starred in Xtro II: The Second Encounter, by the release of Watch the Skies that hugely influential show was in its third season and had worked its way into the alien DNA of the film, with flashlights in the dark, conspiracies and betrayals within the military and a cover up story dating back to a Roswell style incident in the fifties, the government controlling the truth and one of the characters quipping “I know what I’d like to believe.”
The soundtrack even at times mimicking Mark Snow’s ethereal investigative atmospheres, at least when not accompanying the chimps’ tea party of the military operation which begins in a dive bar which apparently doubles as a stripper joint and goes downhill in terms of professionalism, military discipline and duty, the leadership of Captain Fetterman (Wishmaster’s Andrew Divoff) consists of little but contradiction, obfuscation, shouting and belittling even before his duplicity is revealed, the rest of the cast faring no better.
A premise which might have been watchable in a superior production, an alien visitor exacting revenge on those who tortured its associate, waiting on a deserted island for four decades even though it apparently has a working spaceship and could have left any time, Xtro 3 is barely competent, as basic as the panther tattoo on the shoulder of mouth breather Lieutenant Kim (Sal Landi, later an X-Files supporting player), akin to watching a group of particularly challenged adults play dress-up as soldiers as they are threatened by a puppet, little wonder that Stern (The Search for Spock’s Jeanne Mori) rolls her eyes and backs away.
Xtro 3: Watch the Skies will be streaming on the Arrow platform from Friday 18th April
