Portage Theater Brings The "Video Nasty" To The Big Screen With Xtro
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 5, 2012 9:20PM
October is always the best month for movies in Chicago. Everywhere you look the city's movie screens are packed with film festivals, extraordinary repertory screenings, and the most cinematic of all Holidays looming at the end of the month, the Chicago International Film Festival. Which such a richness of spoils, some of the smaller things can have a tendency to get lost.
Take, for example, a little gem sitting on the Portage Theater's calendar in between the blockbuster 24-Hour Massacre event on Oct. 20 and the gigantic, four-day Halloween Havoc on the 28th: 1980s British cult horror oddity, Xtro.
A terrifying jumble of E.T. and John Carpenter's The Thing, with a memorable gross-out bravura sequence that presages Will Ferrell grown man birth skit from SNL in the worst possible way, Xtro has always been associated with the video nasty, horror subgenre shorthand for a list of officially censored films British authorities would seize when raiding video stores.
The plot concerns a father abducted by aliens who returns years later to spawn, reunite with his son, and engineer all sorts of random and disgusting scenarios that make no sense at all but are impossible to watch. Creepy clown? Check. Unexplained panther attack? Covered. Alien-style face hugger? Of course. When director Harry Bromley was filming Xtro in 1982, he says he was trying to "do the most disgusting things that we could get away with." Well, Harry, to quote the creepy father from the film itself, "If you think hard about something, you can make it happen."
It's low-budget, it's strange, and we have certainly never seen Xtro available to watch on any big screen until the Chicago Cinema Society tracked down a 35mm print and organized a screening on Oct. 25. Along with this hulking slab of weirdness is the rock and roll horror movie Trick or Treat, which will demonstrate why you should never under any circumstances play your rare vinyl demos backwards, especially if they belonged to devil-worshiping rock stars. The acting of Gene Simmons and Ozzy Osbourne in this movie alone bumps it to the top tier of scariest films on offer this month.
The Chicago Cinema Society Halloween Double Feature screens on Thursday, Oct. 25 at the Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee Ave. Tickets are $5.