The Visitor (1979)

The Visitor (1979) is a fascinating film - on the one hand its magpie approach to picking out the shiniest themes and motifs from other recent hits would seem to bracket it as a typical piece of Italian seventies exploitation, on the other, its relatively high profile cast, US location filming and relatively high budget suggest a more prestigious production.  The resulting film is definitely schlock, but the higher end of schlock, dressing up its pulpy story with glossy production values.  It has quite a few points of resemblance to an earlier film of producer Ovidio G Assonitis, 1976's Beyond the Door (which he also co-directed), both in plot and production terms.  Both films feature extensive US location shooting and feature English language stars, in an attempt to pass them off as American productions, they also both involve demonic possessions of one kind or another.  While the 1976 film was released in the immediate wake of its obvious progenitors - The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby - and offers a similar theological/supernatural explanation for its events, by 1979 Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had set the box office alight, so The Visitor does its best to cast its possession story in science fictional terms, decking itself out in the traditional trappings of that genre: aliens, spaceships and psi powers.  So we have a back story involving an ancient cosmic struggle between the evil ahape-shifting entity 'Zatteen' who was eventually imprisoned by a space commander called 'Yahweh' but escaped and fled to earth, where he was able to propagate his genes by mating with many earth women before being destroyed by the space commander.  His evil genes still resurface, however, even thousands of years later and the latest manifestation of them have now been detected in an eight year old girl in Atlanta, Georgia, which is where 'Cosmic Jesus' (he's never named as such, but is an obvious Christ analogue) - played by an uncredited Franco Nero - is now sending 'The Visitor' (John Huston), a descendant of 'Yahweh' in order to deal with the situation.

Now, if this sub-Von Daniken set-up sounds bizarre (and another reflection of the film's maker's attempts to cash in on then popular trends), well, that's just the beginning and the plot takes several more left-turns into weirdness as it attempts to reference even more recent cinematic hits.  Not only is the little girl exhibiting paranormal powers (shades of Carrie), but she's also a pawn in the schemes of a cabal wealthy businessmen who are acolytes of 'Zatteen' to resurrect the evil one (shades of The Omen).  Their plan involves one of their number, the owner of a basketball team, to impregnate the girl's mother to create an evil boy, destined to mate with his half-sister in order to create a corporeal manifestation of 'Zatteen'.  There are numerous digressions and sub-plots consequently start to proliferate - part of the cult's plot seems to involve confining the girl's mother to a wheelchair (presumably making her easier to control by constricting her movements and ability to control the child) by having her shot in an incident involving a toy given to the girl as a birthday present that turns into a real gun.  A police detective, played by Glenn Ford, investigates the shooting, gets suspicious, so abruptly dies in a car accident engineered by the cult.  When the mother becomes resistant to the idea of another baby, she finds herself demonically impregnated - but the impregnation is presented in terms of an alien abduction, complete with a huge Close Encounters-style glowing spaceship, inside which cult leader Mel Ferrer, playing a surgeon, surgically implants an embryo in the woman.  Finding she's pregnant, she seeks help from her doctor ex-husband, improbably played by a clearly inebriated Sam Peckinpah (his obvious dubbing the result of him slurring his words and forgetting his lines), who helps her get a termination.  In the meantime, a mysterious nanny (Shelley Winters) has turned up to help the mother with the girl, with whom she strikes up an immediate enmity.

After the termination, all hell breaks loose, with the kid unleashing her powers, attempting to kill her mother, the nanny turning out to be an associate of 'The Visitor', who eventually unleashes a flock of deadly doves against the cult members in scenes clearly meant to evoke The Birds. It all ends with light displays in the sky, people shooting laser beams and 'The Visitor' finally helping the girl conquer the evil in her genes and presenting her to 'Cosmic Jesus'.  The whole thing barely makes sense feeling less like a coherent story than an amalgam of highlights stolen from other recent popular hits, thrown together somewhat randomly and with little regard for context.  It happily raids the likes of The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby and The Omen for its demonically possessed child/satanist plot, Carrie and even The Fury for the child with paranormal powers strand and Star Wars and Close Encounters for its science fiction imagery.  Despite these disparate influences, The Visitor is disconcertingly well made on a technical level, well shot and with excellent production values.  But its script, with its tangled story-telling, jerkily advanced plot and unspeakable dialogue, gives the film away as a big-budgeted piece of Italian exploitation.  The cast, while impressive looking, can make little headway against that script, with several, most notably Ford and Ferrer, playing what are little more than extended cameos.  Despite top-billing, Huston has little to do other than wander around looking enigmatic and uttering words of cod wisdom - he's clearly there for the paycheck, (not for the first time - he lent his name to quite a few dubious internationally produced exploitation movies around this time).  Lance Henricksen barely tries as the main villain - he freely admitted that he only signed up because the studio shooting was in Rome, giving him a free trip to Italy.

It has to be said, though, that The Visitor is actually quite endearing, with its entirely ripped off content and imagery and, at times, feels agreeably deranged, a film created by madmen.  Director Guilio Paradisi (as 'Michael J Paradise'), better known for directing Italian comedies, manages to marshal together the film's eclectic borrowings into a slick package that, for its running time, at least, is surprisingly enjoyable, if confusing.  Its possible that The Visitor might even have been influential:  the more I think about it, the more convinced I've become that all of those light effects may have influenced Luigi Cozzi's The Black Cat (1989), which similarly features all manner of brightly lit video effects at its climax and is just as lunatic, borrowing themes from numerous other movies.