The Visitor Blu-ray Review
By: MattInRC
The release of The Visitor on Blu-ray is an oddly-crafted creation, even by today's standards.
If you never heard of international film producer Ovidio G. Assonitis, you're not alone. A maverick of the 1970's, he regularly 're-imagined' successful films of the time into cheap knockoffs (Jaws became Tentacles, The Exorcist morphed into Beyond the Door). Assonitis had a style to sure, and many of his films exult in their oddity and blatant 'borrowing.' Among his greatest 'creations' is The Visitor, a film so odd - even by today's warped standards - that it instantly enters our Top 5 list. Its eminent arrival onto Blu-ray gives us a chance to look back at what can only be described as an incredibly weird concoction.
Picture this: intergalactic warrior Jerzy Colsowicz (John Huston) joins forces with a Christ-like alien figure (Franco Nero) to battle the demonic 8 year old Katy (Paige Conner) and her pet hawk on Earth. Gifted with telekinetic powers, a sailor's mouth, and a penchant for violence, Katy needs an other-worldly intervention, and Jerzy is just the man for the job. Katy's mother Barbara (Joanne Nail) seems to have an ability to produce children with mutant powers, peaking the interest of her new boyfriend Raymond (Lance Henriksen), who is part of a shadowy cult of evil-doers bent on getting Barbara to produce another child. But that's not all: during Katy’s birthday party, a wrapped gift believed to be a harmless toy bird actually reveals a loaded gun, which Katy happily wields, shooting Barbara in the back and instantly paralyzing her. In Raymond's mind, this act will make Barbara more vulnerable and hopefully force her to marry him. But the old man Jerzy won't have it, and he embarks on a mission to save Katy's soul by taking her back to...wherever he's from.
If all this seems a bit strange, you don't know the half of it. Mixing elements of The Omen, The Birds, and perhaps even Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it's like watching someone's acid trip from the inside. Psychedelic, overly dramatic, and filled with funk music and odd 70's fast closeups, the film exists on the outer edges of cinema, even by today's standards. A story about a Christ-like alien figure joining an intergalactic warrior to battle a demonic 8-year-old girl sounds more like someone's idea of a joke, but The Visitor relishes in the moniker. It's so blatantly unapologetic in its presentation - including some blue screen work of an an epic off-world battle between Jerzy and another demon figure - that one can't imagine the creative team knew or even cared about the end result. Written by Assonitis and directed by Giulio Paradisi, there's an uneven and unsettling feeling here, as if too many hands were in the cookie jar, and those hands were of aliens that didn't know what cookies were. Strange editing cuts persists, and the arrival of Sam Peckinpah as Baraba's ex-husband doctor left his scenes with Nail sounding like a Bruce Lee film.
Everything seems to be thrown into the operation, few of which feel complete or well-thought out. But at least we're treated to a cast of Hollywood legends, including Glenn Ford as a police detective and Shelley Winters as Barbara's housemaid. Henrickson is featured in one of his first roles, and to their credit none of the cast appears to be sleepwalking through their lines. Connor is quite simply the evilest child since The Exorcist, with a potty mouth to match her Antichrist stature. When she appears at the end of the film, head shaved of her long locks, it's an emphatic slamming of the door to a performance that must have shocked moviegoers of the time. The 'music' by Composer Franco Micalizzi is really just one theme and a handful of 2001-esque environmentals, played over and over until its big theme becomes lost. It actually becomes quite comical how often and poorly-placed Micalizzi's theme is, arising each time Jerzy escapes death or flashes a hero moment at Connner.
The Visitor is a weird movie, even by our standards. It easily stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Begotten and Altered States, and in some ways reminds us of standards in film-making that we're glad never took hold. We can only recommend it as part of a drinking game, where viewers would take a shot each time Mivalizzi's theme rears its head. Whether its impending release onto Blu-ray is a warning, a curse, or something in-between, you've been duly informed. The Visitor is Rated R for language and weird Euro music, and has a runtime of 90 minutes.
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