The Visitor [Blu-ray]

I love artists who attempt something different, even if that means they alienate a certain amount of the audience who just won’t “get it”. It takes a certain amount of artistic courage to go off the beaten path. You can almost hear the studio suits of today bellyaching in a board room about how this movie wouldn’t go over in middle-America. But artists want to make art, and that’s what happened with The Visitor. The Visitor is a strange and somewhat disjointed movie, but that just adds to its surreal charm. It is a hodgepodge of ideas that drift between sci-fi and horror. At times, it is a bit hard to get your head around what is going on and I love that. It feels like the filmmakers trusted the audience enough to form their own impressions and understanding of the film’s meaning. And by the end of the movie, several of the unusual earlier scenes do start to make sense! There are a bunch of great, interesting reviews here on Amazon describing the movie itself, so I’ll focus more on the Blu Ray quality. Firstly, I enjoy the aspect ratio. This may seem like an odd point to make, but this allows the movie to fill my screen with no black bars on the top or bottom. This is a movie that deserves all the screen real estate it can get! I am very pleased with the quality of the film transfer for a few reasons. Most importantly, the Blu Ray looks like film and not an overprocessed digital copy. My pet peeve is when films are remastered or transferred with too much noise reduction and other digital meddling. Sure, there are some age-related spics and specs, but much of that clears up after the opening sequence. I actually prefer that they leave that stuff in when a movie is older like The Visitor. It’s like hearing a slight crack or pop when listening to an old record album and is a reminder that it’s the genuine article. When they release older movies that are too pristine or with a “soap opera effect”, it somehow doesn’t feel right to me. Of course, there are lots of people who feel differently and that’s cool too. In closing, this is a surreal, quirky movie that is highly rewatchable. It’s a movie where the creative minds behind the project were left to their own devices and went bonkers! I wish there were more films like it. The Blu Ray quality is not perfect, but for my tastes, that’s a good thing! I would definitely recommend this to fans of creative and imaginative movies.

As everybody in the civilized world knows, back in the 70s and 80s, the Italians made big business out of ripping off American box office successes....but on much smaller budgets of course. The quality of the results is all over the map, ranging from godawful to awful-yet strangely fun and entertaining, to actually being very good and original(a good example being the birth of the "giallo" by more or less trying to rip off Hitchcock). The Visitor is somewhat of a curiosity. It's not a great movie-comfortably watchable, but it's very ambitious and "out there", more so than the standard Italian cash in. Granted, the film isn't a 100% Italian production. It was a U.S/Italian co-production shot in the U.S. with a mostly American cast, but it had an Italian director, Italian crew and was produced by Egyptian-born schlockmeister Ovidio Assonitis. The intent here seems to be a ripoff of The Omen. But this time around, instead of the evil child being the spawn of Satan, the child is the spawn of an evil alien prisoner named Sateen. Far out, eh? The "visitor" in question is John Huston(yes, you read that right! John Huston, the guy who directed The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen) Huston is an alien being who's sent to Earth to retrieve the evil child. Huston spends a great deal of the film watching her, taunting her, and even babysitting her(?). He's waiting on his winged reinforcements to make his move, ya see? While Huston waits and watches dazzling light shows in the sky from an apartment rooftop, the evil Katie does all those nasty things that evil antichrist-ish children do. She paralyzes her mother with an "accidental" gunshot, then kills the officer assigned to the case, played here by Glenn Ford(yes, the same Glenn Ford from the Blackboard Jungle). She makes fools of some preteen boys as the ice skating rink, uses bad language, plays Pong and a whole slew of evil doings. Katie's mother, Barbara, is supposedly the only woman carrying the Sateen gene, so we have a Hail Sateen organization headed by Mel Ferrer who are hell bent on getting Barbara to produce a baby boy. This task they have assigned to Lance Henriksen, a basketball team owner and protector of evil alien children. Also throw in Shelly Winters as a shady housekeeper and Franco Nero as a thinly disguised Jesus Christ(the guy who sent Huston on this mission), and you have, as I said before, a much more ambitious Omen cash-in than you'd think. True, the execution isn't the best it could have been, but the craziness of it all keeps you watching. Not to mention the random and inappropriate blasts of funky music that make you want to jump out of your seat and shake yo'ass while you were just getting into what was going on. Too bad this dvd has already become scarce, but if you have the chance to see The Visitor, invite him in.

I just don't know where to begin, because I want to defend what is unquestionably a terrible film . . . I mean, this movie is really bad. But it's entertaining, if you like bad horror films. Here's the reason to get this: the interviews of the screenwriter and Lance are priceless--just hearing them NOT defend their work on this film, it's worth the price of the DVD alone. The blu-ray treatment of the film itself is excellent, and the film is just . . . it's just insane. So dumb, so gloriously dumb. Finally, I must confess that part of my delight of owning this film---and the exquisite treatment of it by Drafthouse---is my own childhood. My parents took me to see it at a drive-in theater when I was seven or six--I cannot recall. Scenes from this film haunted me for a decade (mostly in nightmares). It is a joy to watch the film as a grown-up and sense why it bothered me so as a young person. It has some arresting imagery. And, it was shot in my hometown, so there's that. I guess I'm saying that it's hard to separate my enjoyment of this film with my personal history. Buy it if you enjoy very bad films---but this DVD, in particular, is wonderful because of the extras . . . the interviews had me laughing aloud. It's a really bad, crazy film. A lot of fun. But don't watch this expecting something it's not . . . it's terrible. And therefore glorious. I hope this makes sense.

So. That happened. Never has a man going up or down a set of stairs been given the most amazing background music. I felt every single stride of that old man going down about a million stairs.