A.k.a. Stridulum

D: Giulio Paradisi [as Michael J.Paradise]. S: Luciano Comici, Robert Mundi. Story: Ovidio Assonitis, Giulio Paradisi. P: Ovidio G.Assonitis. Cast: John Huston, Joanne Nail, Lance Henriksen, Mel Ferrer, Glenn Ford, Franco Nero, Shelley Winters, Paige Conner, Sam Peckinpah. US dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Drafthouse Films.

Battier than The Bad Seed! More eccentric than The Exorcist! Hokier than Holocaust 2000! For sheer demented, addle-pated what-the-fuckery, The Visitor is a tough act to beat. Producer Ovidio Assonitis, having already ripped-off Friedkin/Blatty with Beyond the Door/Chi Sei? (1974) and Spielberg/Benchley with Tentacles (1977), decided to give Blatty a second kicking with this mindwarping dose of Seventies kitsch. Assonitis chose for his director Giulio Paradisi (here credited as “Michael J. Paradise”), one of those special few who have eaten on the insane root, that takes the reason prisoner; according to some who worked with him, Paradisi was also a vainglorious, temperamental a-hole of the first water, though if that’s what it takes to craft a gem like The Visitor, then so be it.

In place of a plot, The Visitor has a cast list of absurdly high-powered Hollywood royalty. John Huston, Glenn Ford, Mel Ferrer, Shelley Winters, Sam Peckinpah (!!)… It’s tempting to leave the synopsis at that, and let you invent your own storyline, but that would be far too sensible. The Visitor consists of random scenes connected, very loosely, by a rambling, crackpot scenario which (according to at least one of its befuddled writers) was changed by Paradisi on a daily basis during the shoot. It’s left to Franco Nero, kitted out exactly like Jesus Christ, to supply the backstory to a slapheaded kindergarten of alien kiddiwinks, living in some outer-space Buddhist retreat: it’s Good versus Evil, folks, with Commander Yahweh taking on the genetically-mutated Sateen, amid a boatload of mythological sci-fi mumbo-jumbo that even the Church of Scientology would find hard to swallow. (Birds have something to do with it. Lots and lots of birds.) Long story short: Sateen’s had a kid on planet Earth, 8-year-old Antichristalike Katy (Paige Conner), and only John “Obi-Wan” Huston can stop her spreading brattery and mild peril to all mankind.

Enough talk: bring on the guest stars! Sporting a natty safari suit and an aura of amused omniscience, John Huston positively exudes screen presence in the Max von Sydow role; his character is apparently a Polish tailor-turned-exorcist, one of many plot points artfully concealed from the viewer, though the way Huston plays it you’d think he was the Lord God Himself. (Huston seems to have brought with him an unusual platoon of angelic bodyguards: a burly mime troupe cloned from Brian Glover, who spend most of their time throwing shapes behind a set of gauze screens on the roof of a skyscraper.) Glenn Ford is the cop doggedly investigating evil Katy’s miniature rampage; after she instructs him to “Go fuhk yaw-seff!”, his eyes are pecked out by her pet hawk and his car cashes and burns with him inside it. Shelley Winters is the kooky, astrologically-obsessed housekeeper with a limited musical repertoire (“Mammy’s li’l baby loves shortnin’ bread”, over and over), who may know more than she lets on about creepy Katy. Mel Ferrer is the diabolical Sateen-cult leader who implants our put-upon heroine (Joanne Nail) with a demon-brother for Katy; Sam Peckinpah is the kindly abortionist she turns to for help. Oh, and there’s also Sateen’s little helper Lance Henriksen, planted by the cult to romance the heroine and protect killer Katy.

Wow. Shot in Atlanta, Georgia (like Cannibal Apocalypse the following year) on a budget that seems to shrink and inflate with each successive scene, The Visitor is surely one of the oddest productions ever to see the light of a projector. Producer Assonitis recruited the cast from his roster of showbiz pals, who seemed happy (if bemused) to muck in; Peckinpah, predictably enough, rose to the challenge set by his director (who can be the biggest prima donna on set?) and was sent packing before his scenes could be completed. (He has only a single scene in the finished film, and his part is dubbed entirely by another performer.) As for the commoners on the bill, special mention to Paige Conner for making Katy the most memorably foul possessed brat this side of Linda Blair, and to Joanne Nail as Katy’s mum, who goes through more here than all of Lars von Trier’s heroines put together. Paradisi must have really had it in for her: she’s shot in the back, paralysed, impregnated by aliens, attacked by a hawk, half-garrotted by piano wire, kicked in the face and sent tumbling down the stairs, and finally pushed head-first through a large glass aquarium (full). Was it something she said, Giulio?

Aficionados of the non sequitur will find much to admire in The Visitor. After a reel or three of haphazard leapfrogging from one set-piece to the next, each more riotously-funny than the last, even the most level-headed viewer may find his grasp on reality slowly slipping away. There are simply too many priceless moments to list in full, but here’s a few highlights: the opening basketball tournament, played completely straight until the final hoop is scored – whereupon hoop, ball and player vanish, inexplicably, in a freeze-framed explosion (never mentioned again); the hockey-rink sequence, where the demon-tyke takes out a gang of teens with a twirly ice-skating routine, finally catapulting them (in extreme slow motion) through plate-glass windows – a scene funnier than DePalma’s Arabs-v-rollercoaster number in The Fury (1978); the Lady From Shanghai homage, in which Huston nimbly dodges the pigtailed terror through a shabby hall of mirrors (“Whuh ah yew, yew oad basturd?!?”); and, lest we forget, the finale. Yes, the finale… Imagine the bat-attack frenzy of Kiss of the Vampire restaged with pigeons – and capped by a brazen, full-on closeup of a carved, wooden and very immobile avian dangling proudly from a wire, prior to skewering Lance Henriksen in the throat with its beak. To keep the viewer off-guard, Paradisi cuts frequently, throughout, to shots of John Huston, hands on hips, observing garish Atari-inspired optical effects (well, coloured blobs of light whizzing around the screen) with all the air of a man who actually knows what the hell is going on. And every now and then, he chucks in a blaring disco fanfare, seemingly at random; the effect is almost Godardian.

By the end of this onslaught, the viewer may come dangerously close to sharing the director’s view of himself as a genius-prophet of rare distinction. That he’s also a raving, undisciplined egomaniac seems to matter less and less by the time the credits roll. It’s possible to envision a range of applications for Paradisi’s masterwork – from treating patients locked in catatonia, to deprogramming North Korean spies. (Harry Palmer seems to have watched something very like it in The Ipcress File [1965], if the psychedelic lights are anything to go by.) As the astute reader will have gathered by now, The Visitor is not just compulsive, but positively compulsory viewing. It is more than cinema, more than mere entertainment. It’s, like, cosmic, man.

(Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to shave my head, buy a safari suit and practice my mime routine. Commander Yahweh is coming over later, and he’s a stickler for detail.)