John’s Shamefully Bad Horror Corner: Xtro 2: The Second Encounter (1991)

MY CALL:  This disaster was unacceptably less British than the original Xtro and delivered none of the gore, schizophrenic cleverness or gross-out factor of its international original.  [F!]  WHAT TO WATCH INSTEAD:  Aliens or Xtro (1983).

Xtro paid homage to the mouth-raping aliens from Alien.  The Second Encounter follows in the style of Aliens, in which these mouth-rapists are met with military force in more of an action movie.

Dr. Casserly (Tara Buckman; Silent Night Deady Night, Freddy’s Nightmares) and Dr. Summerfield (Paul Koslo; Robot Jox, The Omega Man) have found a way to send people to another dimension.  When they send three men through their gateway, something goes wrong and communication is lost.  They send for Dr. Shepherd (Jan-Michael Vincent), the discoverer of this technology, for help.  What follows with that character’s development is a testament to catastrophically poor writing.  Despite all the characters’ PhDs, they come off as nothing but idiotic!

Everybody look busy…like you’re doing science or something!

They manage to teleport one of their lost travelers, Marshall (Tracy Westerholm; Stargate SG 1), back through the gateway.  She’s pretty much comatose until a big, slimy, entrail-covered alien tears out of her and goes into the ventilation shaft…just like in Alien or The Terror Within (1989).  Their military personnel then hunt down the menace with the same guns as the colonial marines from Aliens.

Fertile women and alien movies…what an epic coupling.

I liked this gun more when Bill Paxton was using it.

Further blatantly ripping off Aliens, Dr. Summerfield gets the idea that it would be wiser to keep the alien safely contained than to kill it.  It hurt me when I sensed the end of that sentence in the movie.  Oh, and the alien kills with its tail like when the Alien queen impaled Bishop.  So bad.

This movie is truly awful.  The gore is weak and the creature looks dumb—when we rarely see any of it.  The action scenes hardly have any action as we swap close-up views of someone firing a gun and this slimy dinosaur-monster screeching.  After about fifteen minutes I could tell I’d be sitting around just waiting for this debacle to end.

Ouch!