The Visitor

The Visitor is wonderful to write about, but the viewing experience that it provides doesn’t live up to the bizarreness that one would expect from a mere recitation of this indefinable film’s various aspects, which should be a guarantee of an entirely extraordinary experience. Here we have an evidently generously funded production from the golden era of Italian genre cinema, directed by Federico Fellini’s assistant and featuring a number of notable award-winning stars such as Mel Ferrer, Glenn Ford, John Huston, Shelley Winters and Lance Henriksen, as well as Franco Nero as the cosmic Jesus, and even director Sam Peckinpah, who by then was so worn out that his lines had to be dubbed over. The plot is a phantasmagorical mix of a cult leader’s diary entries and The Omen, enriched with inspiration from The Birds and Carrie, as well as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and THX 1138. With its polished form and unsettling atmosphere, The Visitor is stylistically closest to Lucio Fulci’s best works, such as The Beyond, which push the envelope of rationality and expose viewers to an almost hallucinatory derangement outside of the traditional narrative concepts seen in both mainstream and arthouse contexts. Yes, that perhaps sounds too good for it to be functional in at least some sense. After watching The Visitor, it’s possible to believe the rumours that the director refused to explain his vision to the actors and the members of the crew during filming, because everyone involved actually looks like they have found themselves in a different world, where they carry out programmed actions against their will. It’s hard to say whether The Visitor was supposed to be an off-the-wall work of a deranged fanatic like Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard (or rather John Travolta) or a caustically consistent contribution among the Italian copies of Hollywood hits at the time. In either case, it definitely works not as a serious film, but only as a boisterously campy flick in which you will thoroughly enjoy every other WTF moment. After all, The Visitor evokes the Italian horror tradition only in its formalistic techniques. With its bombast, excessiveness and playful use of mechanical and optical tricks, however, it has much more in common with the Hong Kong burlesque attractions of Lam Ngai Kai. (07.04.2014)

This is a relatively realistic portrayal, with strange fantastic elements that really captured my interest. It's not a great film, that's for sure, and it's not even philosophically groundbreaking although it tries to convey something. However, it's so delightfully eccentric that it fits perfectly into my collection of oddities. This is a style that I quite enjoy. (27.02.2016)

A shameless and utterly muddled rip-off of The Omen that adds a sort of nonsensical space sci-fi element to the original concept, so that even fans of Close Encounters of the Third Kind will have a good time. The little girl gives a terrible performance, the classic John Huston, with his impish smile, looks like he's all over it and is mentally counting down the days until the end of the shoot, and Franco Nero, who in the late seventies was grateful for every gig in Hollywood, is fun with his blonde long wig in a short performance as an alien. The worst part about the whole thing is that, in its own perverse way, I enjoyed watching it because it has the inimitable patina of pieces from a decade when anything was possible in film. (09.07.2023)