Vinegar Syndrome gives us another reason beginning with an X to watch the skies in the direct-to-video XTRO 3, on Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome.

Reporter Erica Stern (Jeanne Mori, REAL GENIUS) agrees to meet demolitions expert Lieutenant Martin Kirn (Sal Landi, BULLETPROOF) who is in hiding and has a story no one will believe. Weeks before, he was brought on by Major Guardino (Robert Culp, A NAME FOR EVIL) for a special assignment concerning an uncharted island that had been used as a Japanese internment camp during World War II, after which it was strangely forgotten until some government bureaucrats came across files mentioning its existence. The government hopes to find a use for the island, but first they must have it swept for any remaining landmines. Guardino reveals that operative Captain Fetterman (Andrew Divoff, WISHMASTER) has pre-selected Kirn's crew from those he has already trained; but Kirn has less faith in the choices, none of whom he would have recommended for service: psychopath Reilly (David M. Parker), combative lesbian Banta (Andrea Lauren Herz), sociopath Hendricks (writer Daryl Haney, WATCHERS II) who blew off one of his fingers disregarding Kirn's instructions, and Friedman (Tom's brother Jim Hanks, FATAL PASSION) whose brain and mouth are too quick for his own good. Fetterman and his assistant Watkins (SANTA BARBARA's Karen Moncrieff) are adamant that any documents regarding the camp be turned over to them, preferably without any of Kirn's team looking over them too closely. On the island, they discover thousands of rabbits – ostensibly from whatever scientific research took place there decades before – but Kirn also discovers a mass grave of skeletons and a pocket watch inscribed with a date suggesting the island was inhabited a decade past the war, and subsequently encounters a wild man (Virgil Frye, GRADUATION DAY) who tries to warn them of danger. While detonating some mines, Banta and Hendricks accidentally blow a hole in a large sealed cement block. Hendricks crawls in and disappears while Banta's hand is badly burned on some slime when she tries to follow him. Returning to the block with the rest of the team, they discover that the inside is a lab surrounding an alien ship. A film reveals that scientific experimentation on an alien that caused its mate to break free and run amuck before the lab was sealed off. It turns out that said alien is still alive and has already made its way out and starts picking them off one by one… that is, if they do not fall prey to Fetterman's attempts to silence them on behalf of the government.

The first XTRO film, an alternately somber and outrageous early eighties British low-budget production that played like an ALIEN rip-off crossed with Andrzej Zulawski's arthouse horror POSSESSION, a domestic drama in which a long-absent father returns to his broken family physically changed by an encounter not of this Earth. The second film made in Canada was a more conventional sci-fi adventure with borrowings from PREDATOR, and third film lensed in Southern California is more of the same. The title alone is the only thing that distinguishes the film from hundreds of low-budget direct to video science fiction films in the post-X-FILES mold. While there was ambiguity in the first film as to whether the alien father was drawn to his old family out of affection or as easy prey for alien transformation and reproduction, the alien here is just a sadist driven by revenge and inflicting torture on its victims with lasers and probes, and the half-CGI, half-animatronic alien looks far sillier than the first film's crab-walking man in a latex suit. The setup is laborious and trying, with the film only picking up after the first half-hour. With the exception of Moncrieff and phoning-it-in Culp, who has since gone on to a directing career in television, the acting is universally bad, particularly TV character actor Landi and the usually entertaining Divoff, both of whom bellow their dialogue to embarrassing effect. Davenport attempted to diversify his career by moving into comedy (LIFE AMONG THE CANNIBALS) and drama (MOCKINGBIRD DON'T SING), returning to horror with the uneven ghost story HAUNTED ECHOES.

While the first two films were distributed stateside by New Line Cinema and still owned by them – hence why we've only got a region free Blu-ray of the first film from the Second Sight in the U.K. – XTRO 3 was released to tape by Triboro and subsequently on laserdisc and fullscreen DVD by Image Entertainment while a UK trilogy box set was also fullscreen and only had extras for the first film. Transferred from a 2K scan of the 35mm original camera negative, Vinegar Syndrome's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray looks as good as the film likely can, with enhanced textures in clothing, facial features, hair, and prosthetics, it is the cheapness of the film's production that comes across most strongly, like a Syfy channel feature in terms of photography, bad CGI, and some obvious miniatures. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo track is overall modest, from a weak synth score to a few directional effects, and explosions without much in the low end. Optional English SDH subtitles are included.