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| From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IhK_9db3Sf4/TZ1TxQRXtjI/ AAAAAAAAH30/EEBd_dCKPhE/s1600/the%2Bvisitor%2Bposter%2B2.JPG |
Dir. Giulio Paradisi (as Michael
J. Paradise)
There's always a tinge of concern
with viewing films that have become the new cult favourite which The Visitor has been in the United
States before getting a release in Britain. Not because of an inherent bias but
that they tend to be the more 'mainstream' and the least interesting films for
me compared to those less known. The
Visitor however has proven to be special. Contrary to the writing on it,
the film makes sense. An alien of evil power was defeated but not without
mating with human women, leading to the sole woman able to give birth to beings
with supernatural beings, Barbara Collins (Joanne
Nail), and her daughter Katy Collins (Paige
Conner), a being with powers who, with her attitude, her killer pet hawk
and death stare behind her pigtails, makes Damien from The Omen (1976) the mere toddler he is. A secret group of men, led
by Dr. Walker (Mel Ferrer), want
Barbara to have more children, using Raymond Armstead (Lance Henriksen) to try and seduce her, but as Katy Collins makes her
powers known, individuals connected to actor Franco Nero sporting Jesus Christ's hairstyle, and a room of bald
children, plan to stop the villains and bring Katy Collins to their fold,
represented the most by Jerzy Colsowicz
(film director John Huston). |
| From http://nerdreactor.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Visitor1.jpg |
Effectively it's a sci-fi twist
on The Omen, part the mad Italian
film it is, part the curious history of the paranormal in culture of it's era especially
in the US of A. After the moon landings, (unless you believe they were faked
with Stanley Kubrick directing the
footage), the obsession with aliens and UFOs, the obsession with psychics, the
after taste of hippy culture moving to New Age culture, Wicca, and Anton LaVay's Church of Satan mistaken
as actually being about devil worship rather than anti-conformist beliefs. The
thing that makes The Visitor weird
is not that it's plot doesn't make sense, but the brew of all these strands
with a film structured in a way that makes it much more perplexing. I can get
around the back story dropped on you in the first minutes by Franco Nero as Space Christ, or how the
film goes narratively, or when Shelley
Winters, as a mysterious housekeeper interested in astrology and star
signs, starts going into a vague topic on New Age metaphors with the director
of Key Largo (1948). What's more off-kilter
is the cuts between Barbara at the hospital, after being left paralysed from
the waist down by an unexpected gift on her daughter's birthday, with her
daughter doing gymnastics or the prolonged sequences with the director of Wise Blood (1979) conducting bald men around
semi-transparent panels like an installation piece. Or the unexpected incident
at an ice hockey rink with older boys chasing after Katy Collins, only to turn
into tragedy. The perplexing aspects of the film are trying to wrangle to potpourri
of ideas, and films it's obviously borrowing inspiration from, into angles and
shapes that are unexpected to the viewer. Very rarely does a film that makes no
sense come off as fascinatingly odd, just tedious, the films that grab people
having a tentative concept within them, even if you have to improvise a
narrative for them, and going through the film adrift in the content. Here,
every has a rationality to it even if you do have to wonder what was going on
in the script. It's how it's presented that makes you go from this and become
baffled.
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| From http://nerdreactor.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Visitor6.jpg |
Is it a good film? Well Henriksen has called it "a turkey made out of cement", but
with no desire to insult the great and prolific character actor, if this is a
"bad" film, it's still one which burns virtues. A technical beauty if
any in terms of beautiful cinematography, sharp and startling use of editing,
and memorable imagery and sequences. The opening scene on another planet in snowfall
with two figures. The ice skating sequence itself in editing between the rink
and John Huston going down the longer
set of mall staircases possible. The masked men coming out of a truck, in the
middle of the night, with a wheelchair nearby. The gruesome use of a garrotte
wire on a certain piece of equipment and how the camera is angled. Too many
images and sequences, inspired or bizarre, to mention. For a notorious film,
produced by producer/filmmaker Ovidio G.
Assonitis, of Tentacles (1977) and
Piranha II: The Spawning (1981),
this has a level of artistry that makes it impossible to view as less than an
incredibly accomplished film. Even though it has quirks, this artistry
undermines the notions of a so-bad-it's-good movie, because a film like this
that runs rings around 'better' films, defined in terms of their plot and
logic, is superior to them regardless. For its visuals, for its music by
composer Franco Micalizzi, though
some of it sounds like the score for a TV cop show, and it's eye for visual tricks
such as a scene in a room full of mirrors. As a seventies film as well it is
given an additional aesthetic boost. The use of locations, exteriors shot in
the US, interiors in Italian, is distinct, of urban streets and modernist architecture,
a sense of space and rooms that is bold and memorable. That's not to mention
that materials within these spaces, from the clothes to the objects. Peculiar
room decorations like a metal tree in one corner that catches your eyes, to the
prominent use of a Pong game console, not only used in the plot for the first
meeting of two antagonists, but with its giant green screen projected on the
wall, tiny blocks of various sizes moving in different directions, almost
becoming an avant-garde flourish by accident. All of this adds to the extraterrestrial
tone of the science fiction, an era of sci-fi that is dated aesthetically
through modern perceptions, but now having an alien mood to them, of
then-modern futuristic office buildings contrasting against hot dog stands and the
run down building that John Huston
spends his time in with his troop of bald performance artists.
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| From http://horrornews.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12 /The-Visitor-1979-Trailer.mov.0002.jpg |
Yes, the film feels ramshackle at
points, times where it nearby falls off the rails in its moments of esoteric gobbledygook.
But this film is what the term "marvellous", as the Surrealists used
it, might have been for, amazing in how it completely folds conventional
filmmaking, or specifically films like The
Omen and American paranoia thrillers, inside-out and lets you see the
content in an inherently weird light. Plus it helps this is what, viewing it
the first time, you'd want from a film labelled "cult". Despite my hesitance,
Drafthouse Pictures and American
hipsters were right on the money clamouring over this film. Where Paige Conner, as an evil young girl,
turns the air blue with some of the obscene words she says or the threats she
makes that you may have difficulty in doing now in films. Where another
legendary film director, Sam Peckinpah,
has a small role and it happens to be in a scene with the most emotional
investment. Where one of the main tropes of the film are bird attacks,
including one inside of care, or how, as mentioned, the first and very
important meeting between two supernatural and cosmic figures is over a game of
Pong. A film that has made me appreciate John
Huston and want to see more of his films, utterly charismatic in his role
and apparently the most charming and kind human being on the set according to
the grown up Paige Conner, his role as a cosmic visitor befitting a man with his
legacy and even an accent that is referenced from that went from forties noir
to films like this. Where Lance Henriksen,
despite his dismissal of the film, got a lead role and in a film that actually
has immense quality behind it. So much in this comic mess is too exhilarating
for me to care about absurd things like logic when The Visitor is a fest in content I gravitate to anyway.
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| From http://www.tribute.ca/images/videos/the-visitor-1979-10671-large.jpg |
Abstract Rating
(High/Medium/Low/None): Low
The one thing that may surprise
some reading this is that I don't find The
Visitor that peculiar in context of this blog. Down get me wrong, it's an
unconventional movie alright, a weird little cosmos sci-fi film with tinges of
horror. A downright weird film in fact, where you have John Huston and Space Jesus against a demonic girl and her pet hawk
in the good and bad roles in the film. Of pseudo-religious monologues or a
weird mechanical toy bird that talks in a creepy way, and how its all settled
with the least expected deus ex machina and everyone being friends whose not
human. It's content sieved through its structure makes it even more stranger,
undercutting the logic of certain moments, causing one to be left in an
unexpected position of what will happen. But it says something about the
strictness of the rules for this and how high the bar is positioned in my blog
that this is a minor Bronze of the rankings. It really says how more strange
the films that get higher than this in the ranking are.
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A Cinema of the Abstract movie?
Absolutely. This is the kind of
film that the moment I hear of it I wanted to see it. That's it's been brought
back from obscurity for people to see, relished upon, is a great thing, and the
film didn't disappoint. In fact I was legitimately blown away by the film in
its madness. Writing this, I have an utter glee in thinking about The Visitor¸ enjoying myself writing
this review more than some of the others despite liking most of the films for
this season, which says good things about this film in the long run.
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