Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter X

X-Files, The (1998) A caveman battles a creature deep underground and is invaded by creatures from its blood. Cut to the present. A kid falls into a hole in the ground in Texas and his body is invaded by worm-like creatures, which wander about under his skin. He is whisked away in a helicopter and the government moves in to cover things up.
   A week later, our 2 heroes, Scurrilous & Muldoon, are looking for a bomb in Dallas. They find it in the wrong building and the leader of their team orders an evacuation and then sits back and waits for the bomb to go off. Three people are found in the wreck; the kid from earlier and 3 of the firemen who got him out of the hole.
   Scully decides to quit X-filing and Mulder goes to a bar to get loaded. There, he meets a bloke who tells him the bodies were dead before the building blew. At a secret government laboratory, there's another fireman being digested by an alien organism. S&M get a shock when they sneak a look at the bodies in Dallas; no autopsies were performed and there's a cover-up going on. Mulder is warned that the US government has the Ultimate Plague.
   A creature hatches out of the fireman before he can be given a vaccine. It attacks a researcher, so his colleagues bury the entrance to the lab. The human stooges of aliens which say they want to colonize Earth realize that the real plan is to use the human race for food as part of a replacement plan. S&M have fun & games with bees then black helicopters chase them through a corn crop at another secret research station out in the desert.
   Scully tells Mulder she's definitely quitting but she collapses after one of the bees stings her. Mulder calls for help, Scully is kidnapped by the government and Mulder is shot but only grazed. The 'Lone Gunmen' gang help him to escape, and he is given the antidote and a silly story about an ancient virus, which was around on Earth before the dinosaurs. Then his informant's car blows up.
   Mulder heads off somewhere snowy, tracks Scully down in an underground lab, gives her the vaccine and they escape as aliens start hatching out of the other bodies in storage. An ice dome collapses on the secret base, a huge spaceship heads into space and the whole thing is covered up. But S&M decide to carry on regardless; as do the conspirators. They set up their bees and corn crop somewhere in Tunisia.

X-Men (2000) is Marvel Comics superheroes on the big screen. Mutants are causing trouble in the USA and Cap'n Picard is running a school for gifted children as a cover for training good mutants. His enemy is an evil mutant called Magneto, who turned a McCarthy-like senator into a mutant. And his master plan is to turn the world's leaders into muties!!! Lots of special effects and action, and bits knocked off the poor old Statue of Liberty again.

X-Men: The Last Stand (2005) 20 years before, Charles & Eric were recruiting the mutants, some reluctant, like Jean & Warren. Then a battle with a monster machine, which turns out to be only a simulation at the Dept. of Mutant Affairs. Homeland Security is tracking Eric, a.k.a. Magneto, whose agent is trying to steal a mutant gene suppressing agent.
   Magneto organizes a protest of mutants who don't think they have a disease. Dead Jean returns to Scott. Winged Warren refuses to take the cure. Magneto frees his agent, who tells him that the source of the cure is a mutant child on Alcatraz just before she's shot with the antidote and rejected by Magneto as no longer a mutant.
   Jean has returned as the Phoenix, a creature of unlimited powers and no control. She wipes out Scott and Professor Charles, and joins up with Magneto. Some mutants embrace the 'cure', others flock to Magneto's protest movement. Magneto is planning to destroy the cure and take over the world.
   Logan invades Magneto's camp but gets the bum's rush. Magneto repositions the Golden Gate bridge to get his mob to Alcatraz. The army uses plastic weapons on the rabble but Magneto's mutants zap them. The X-Men form a defensive line for a huge battle and Warren saves the scientist in charge of the cure. Magneto is exposed to the cure, Jean trashes the Rock but Logan zaps her, and Eric ends up playing chess in the park.

Xchange (2000) is built on the premise that people can move long distances quickly by exchanging their body with someone else via a mind-swapping machine. Only when reluctant traveller Toffler wants to make the return journey, he finds that his body has been hijacked by a corporate terrorist. Then his consciousness is swapped into a clone with a remaining life of just 52 hours. And if he doesn't have his mind moved elsewhere, he'll be dead.
Toffler does a runner from the Exchange building in San Franciso and heads for New York, only to find that there is a missile waiting to home in on his temporary ID when he takes it out of a shielded pouch! Lots of sex, violence and corporate skulduggery, and quite an entertaining couple of hours.

Xtro II: The Second Encounter (1990) is the monster from Alien recovered from a parallel dimension to a vast underground complex, where it runs riot, kills people and gets itself smashed to smithereens by the bloke who is Stringfellow Hawk in Airwolf. Mr. Hawk is brought in because he is the only person who has been to the parallel dimension and returned [in Xtro I]. Lots of arguing between the humans and a bit of aliens bursting out of human bodies but not that much gore and chomping. Lots of shooting, though.

xXx (2002) A spy is killed by Anarchist bad guys so Mr. Gibbons of the NSA decides to send in a snake, not another mouse. He gives the gig to Zander Cage (Vin Diesel), who has xXx tattooed on the back of his neck, after this exhibitionist trashes Senator Dick's car on video for being a dickhead. Testing Cage involves dropping him onto a Colombian drug gang while the local army is cleaning it up (work of fiction, remember?).
Next stop, Prague, where the Secret Service don't want Cage around. Cage does such a great job that Gibbons gives him some spy weapons and tells him to keep digging. Cage catches the head bad guy's girlfriend, Yelena, up to no good and tells her he's a spy. Then someone phones Grigori, the bad guy, and tells him that Cage is a spy.
Gibbons extracts Cage and tells him to go home, knowing Cage will do the opposite. Yelena is an FSB agent and Grigori is planning to launch bio-weapons from a mini-sub. Cage breaks into his castle by parachute & avalanche, Grigori launches his sub and Cage has to chase it down the river Vltava, nearly taking out Prague before he kills it off.