Xtro 3: Watch the Skies (1995)

Best movie ever!

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The original "Xtro" (1983) still remains a cult favorite these days, because of the gory effects and weird nightmare sequences. Certainly, it was influenced by Ridley Scott's "Alien" (1979) but it was no cheap rip-off. Unfortunateley, that was the case with "Xtro 2: The Second Encouter" (1990). It had nothing in common with the original one and was nothing more than a mix between "Alien" and "Aliens". To a certain level, it was enjoyable, but not very good. It had it's moments.No memorable moments for the awful "Xtro 3: Watch The Skies". What the hell ? Again, totally unrelated to the previous films, so why the title ? Just another way to cash in on the cult success of the first one. But this time, it really is bad.. No idea what Andrew Divoff (Wishmaster) is doing here, the rest of the unknown cast if unconvincing. That can also be said about the creature, you can hardly see it and that may be for the best because it is bad and awful. The awful story is boring and uninspired. I use the word awful a lot but that perfectly describes this cheap mess.. avoid it at all cost....

I like Sci-Fi movies and everything 'bout it and aliens, so i watched this flick. Nothing new, nothing special, average acting, typical H. B. Davenport' story, weak and cheesy FX's, bad ending of movie, but still the author idea is good. The marines on lost island find the truth about alien landing there and truth about past-experiments on them. They die one after one, some of them were killed by lonely alien, and others by human enemies. UFO effects, when it flees and crushes are bad,too. The voices of angry alien are funny,too. Reminds me on young monkeys. The movie is not scary, not very funny (maybe the old man, which marines find on the lost island, is the funniest freak in the movie. He's all confused and he dances all the time like old drunk). A little better sequel than XTRO 2: Second Encounter and 3-times weakest than the original movie. As I say "for the hardest fans only".

The XTRO-trilogy (if you can call it that) is an odd phenomenon. The three movies are totally unrelated, except for the fact that they all were directed by Harry Bromley Davenport and they all deal with extra-terrestrial encounters. The first XTRO was a peculiar little sci-fi/horror/drama-gem. A weird mixture of genres, but a good flick nonetheless. XTRO II: The Second Encounter was a shameless ALIEN rip-off, solid in creature-terror, but over-all bad. And XTRO 3: Watch The Skies unfolds more like a 90 minutes episode of THE X-FILES mixed with military stuff and ripped details from PREDATOR. So go figure.Now, XTRO 3 is slightly better than the second one only because it actually has a bit of a plot. It has also another rather unique aspect: it's a sort of alien-revenge-flick (there aren't many of those, are there?) A group of expendable military misfits are send out to clean up a remote island, for the military has plans to build a base there. Soon they discover that there's actually an all different purpose to their visit as they encounter an alien on that island.The actors are unknown & mediocre and the characters are all clichés. Except for Andrew"Djinn"Divoff. It's nice to see him again, but his performance is rather unnoticeable, and you get the idea that he's only any good when he can deliver witty one-liners. The camera-work is pretty bad too. The musical score is at times really cheap, but sometimes they surprisingly use the right scary sounds. But it was at those moments that I suspected they used parts from other movie's soundtracks.As for the alien effects: they're pretty good, especially the moving facial features. There are some decent gore-effects too, but the rest of the special effects look crappy.At times you will have to fight off boredom while watching this flick, but the occasional voice-over from the main character makes you want to know how it all will end. So, if your looking for an off-beat sci-fi quicky, XTRO 3 might be worth a watch. More demanding sci-fi fans should better ignore it.

This production was recently shown on Dutch TV, the TV-guide announced it as a very poor Predator ripp-off. Since the original Predator is one of my favourites, I taped Xtro for later reference. One day waiting on a cable guy I decided to view it. It was a long wait, I can tell you that. The urge of pressing the FF button every second scene was so enormous that I had to give in. This piece of junk does not even qualify as a Cult-thing by any standard. There is nothing to laugh about and script/acting/screenplay/continuity are so poor that you wonder why in the hell garbage like this makes it on video and National TV!. Don`t waste your time on this one. Go rent the original Predator, find a big screen TV, some Dolby stuff and let that cable guy stand in the rain for an hour or two....