(Giulio “Michael” Paradisi, USA/Italy, rated R, 1979, 108 mins)
In the next scene, a Joaquin Phoenix-looking teacher (Django's Franco Nero) with long blond hair and blue eyes--very Glamour Shots® Jesus--tells a class full of bald boys a convoluted story about the man, a mutant named Sateen who came to Earth to escape the war ravaging his home planet. Apparently, Sateen fathered all these cult-like kids--even though he's brain dead. Or something. Logic slips off the screen before it has a chance to take root.
Just when things can't get much stranger, noir icon Glenn Ford (four years away from J. Lee Thompson's Canadian slasher Happy Birthday to Me) shows up as an investigator and Shelley Winters (who became a regular presence in Italy in the 1970s) appears as an inexplicably French maid-garbed housekeeper.
The Visitor is one of those what-the-fuck films that thrived in the anything-goes 1960s and 1970s.
The financing would come from all over the place, the writers and directors were often--but not exclusively--unknowns, and the casts were a crazy, mixed-up collection of no-names and big stars fallen on hard times...but that doesn't mean they were all bad (I quite like 1967's Grand Slam, another Italian hodgepodge with Janet Leigh and Edward G. Robinson).
Accordingly, Italian actor-turned-director Giulio Paradisi (La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2) lifts from The Birds, The Exorcist, Star Wars, and any other film that happened to capture his fancy at the time. He even expands his cherry-picking reach for a funhouse mirror sequence towards the end which plays like a cross between The Lady from Shanghai and Enter the Dragon.
In the prologue, a hooded figure walks across the desert towards actor-director John Huston clad in Obi Wan Kenobi drag (I'll assume Paradisi cast him based on a superficial resemblance to The Exorcist's Max von Sydow). Once the small creature is standing in front of him, its robe falls to reveal a creepy, doll-like girl covered with fake snow. She disappears as quickly as she arrived. And there you have it: The Visitor is that kind of film.
From there, the action moves to a basketball game in Atlanta. Watching, along with Ray (Lance Henricksen, one year after Alien), the owner of the home team, is a little girl with feathered hair and big white sunglasses. She's Katy (Paige Conner), eight-year-old daughter of Ray's girlfriend, Barbara (The Gumball Rally's Spokane-born Joanna Naill), i.e. the girl from the desert. (If you've always suspected that Henricksen--much like Harry Dean Stanton--was born old, this film will disprove you of that notion.)
The Visitor then turns on Ray's attempts to impregnate Barbara so she'll give birth to a son, but she already has one weird kid. She doesn't want another, except Miguel Ferrer's cabal is counting on him to make it happen. When Katy accidentally shoots her mother, it puts a crimp in their plans.
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The rest of the film revolves around various attempts to get a woman pregnant against her will. The Visitor may just be a low-budget quickie designed to make money, but I found the idea repellent. Worse yet: Barbara turns into more and more of a human punching bag as the film goes along (the opposite of Naill's kickass role in Jack Hill's Switchblade Sisters).
The overwrought, TV-quality score is amusing and Paradisi conjures up a stirring atmosphere through bird cries and rumbling sound effects, but the acting is mediocre at best--Conner is particularly wooden--and as fucked-up as this thing may be, it never goes as far as I'd been led to believe. So, is it worth seeing? Sure. Some things simply have to be seen to be believed.
The extras on the home-video release include featurettes with writer Luciano Comici, cinematographer Ennio Guarnieri (Swept Away), and a bemused Henricksen, who aptly calls The Visitor "a hodgepodge of other movies."
The Visitor is available to stream for free on Peacock, Prime Video, and Tubi. It's also on Blu-ray and DVD via Alama Drafthouse. It may be damning it with faint praise, but the poster image (which also appears on the home-video release) for the 2014 reissue is an all-timer. Images from the IMDb.
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