The Visitor (1979)

Simply Perfect

Great Film overall

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

In 2013, when the Alamo Drafthouse presented the uncut version of this film for the first time in the United States, they referred to it as an "unforgettable assault on reality." Those words best describe what is otherwise an indescribable film.But I'm going to try.Maybe a recipe will help.Take Chariots of the Gods, and some of Rosemary's Mary, then a little bit of The Omen, throw it in a blender and then pour the whole thing down the sink.No? Maybe a synopsis.We start in Heaven, or somewhere very much like it, where Franco Nero (the original Django) is one of those space gods that Däniken wrote about. He tells the bald children who surround him that there was once a war between two aliens, one good and one bad. The bad one — who is either called Sateen or Zathaar — was defeated, but not before he slept with a whole bunch of Earthwomen. Cue the Book of Enoch in the Lost Books of the Bible. Or cue the Scientology myth of Lord Xenu. Or Xemu, because he has two different spellings, too.Only one child is left — a young girl — and a vast conspiracy wants her mother to have another child — a brother this time — so they can mate. The Christ figure sends John Huston — yes, the director of The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen — and the bald children to a rooftop somewhere in Atlanta to stop this plot. To do that, the children become adult bad men and dance around a lot while Huston walks up and down the stairs to triumphant music. If you think I'm making that last sentence up, you've never been blessed with this movie.Read more at bandsaboutmovies.com/2017/09/01/the-visitor-1979/

The Visitor is an Italian/Yank scifi flick that rips off so many classics (The Omen, the Exorcist, The Birds, Carrie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) but in itself amounts to a pile of garbage. The cinematography resembles some of those 70's soft porn movies thanks to it's weird glowy lighting. There is also extensive use of those awkward extreme zoom shots and sometimes camera moves are flat-out idiotic (filming the back of peoples heads on purpose). They even dare use sped up footage because actors were not able to do something fast enough but this looks insanely cheap. The music seams to be lifted from Magnum P.I. or Shaft and does not fit a scifi/horror film that's supposed to be brooding and ominous. So much for the atmosphere. If the razzies had existed then many actors here would have received one. The girl that plays the 'evil child' is far from convincing but the other actors don't do much better. Can you believe Sam Peckinpah was in this film and he couldn't remember his lines so they dubbed him (badly - lip sync is way off). Lance Henriksen also shows his mug but his performance is as flat as his paycheck must have been. The story is one uneventful mess filled with plot holes and inconsistencies. So not a cult classic but cult crap hardly worth your time unless you want to see how not to make a movie.

After discovering the last demonic progeny on Earth, a man races off to stop a young girl from leading her mother astray into procreating a being like her that will signal the end of mankind before it occurs.This was just an overall confusing and just plain messy effort that was really troubling. One of the main problems with this one is the fact that there's just no sense at all to the storyline as this one is so over-done and jumbled together that there's hardly anything that becomes coherent about it. The concept of the astral-dimensional progeny of a satanic deity manifesting in a little girl is a fine-enough concept if only it stuck with that, despite how loony and hokey that plot-device actually is, but then it adds in a series of utterly twisted and jumbled plot-points including a pet hawk that's trained to kill, a holy Jesus figure recounting tales to bald-headed children in a garden-of-eden setting, aliens disguised as humans, abductions, satanic powers and two secret society's intent on the interest of the little girl yet both of whom seem malicious more-often-than-not including the supposed protectors so this thing is so stuffed with off-the-wall moments and plot-points that it's hard to keep track of anything. There's so much going on here with all these elements thrust into the middle of the story that elements start canceling each other out, drop off all together which makes their inclusion questionable in the first place or merely set-up in order to ensure that there's something on-screen to hinder the criminally slow-pace and lack of action that continually hurtles forth here as each of these presents it's own problems to the film as it sort of lumbers along without much grasp of how to actually utilize such seemingly independent ideas into a cohesive whole. It really does become such a burden trying to shift through the plot here that it finally outlives it's usefulness and renders the finale nearly moot by the time it finally comes around as the action of the chase through the hospital corridors, down into the street and finally back into the house of mirrors that it doesn't seem to matter how much fun and exciting all this becomes as the ensuing points to get there don't make sense and become quite troublesome to get through. There's a good film in this somewhere as the striking visuals and chilling origins state here, but it's just not found under the weight of the massive, messy-written story.Rated Unrated/R: Violence, Language and children-in-jeopardy.

This freaky movie freaked me out. If you love scenes of old men walking down stairs you'll love this movie. Thank you to the sound editor for playing sexy music during the discussion about abortion. The apparent mime camp on the roof was fascinating. And how about that Jesus guy on that heaven planet. Also, seemingly all children are bald in heaven. There's a lot of graphic beak stabbing viewer discretion is advised. This movie proves that you can get about with just about anything is you put on a freaky accent.I do not approve of the inappropriate angles during the gymnastic scenes. This movie was freaky and had some major flaws.