Coming to the Brattle this Friday is Giulio Paradisi’s (directing under the fantastic name Michael J. Paradise) The Visitor. Released in 1979, it is quite possibly one of the strangest films ever made; not only for its brazenly plagiaristic plot, but for its entirely misleading poster art and bizarre cast (Shelley Winters, Franco Nero, directing legends John Huston and Sam Peckinpah). Ostensibly telling the story of a telekinetic girl who channels interdimensional space spirit Sateen (not a typo), along the way it manages to rip off The Omen, The Exorcist, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Rosemary’s Baby, and pretty much anything else that made any money in the 1970s. Yet miraculously, and despite its best efforts to the contrary, The Visitor ends up one of the more watchable disasters of the last 40 years.
Based on this description, The Visitor may seem to be the grandfather of the modern “mockbuster,” those trashy, Aslyum-produced, green screen disasters costarring Leif Garrett and C. Thomas Howell that air late at night on SyFy, with names that straddle the line of legality (Transmorphers, Almighty Thor). While both are clearly cash grabs that rip off preexisting intellectual property, what separates the two is that while modern mockbusters are so frustratingly self aware of the overused excuse of “so bad it’s good” that they intentionally shoot for middle ground, The Visitor seems to truly believe in its ability to tell an original, symbolic story, blissfully unaware of its many thefts from other films. And instead of Tiffany and Jason/Jeremy London, this movie has John Fucking Huston.
You can’t beat that.
THE VISITOR | RATED R | AT BRATTLE THEATRE FRI 11.22-TUE 11.26 | TIMES AND PRICES VARY
