Stridulum

Evil alien Jerzy Colsowicz (John Huston) is searching for 8-year-old Katy Collins in Atlanta who has mysterious powers. He and his bald headed children are opposed by a Jesus Christ figure. Raymond Armstead (Lance Henriksen) is the rich owner of the Atlanta basketball franchise. He is part of a conspiracy trying to gain control of the little girl by marrying her mother Barbara and having another child with her. Katy gets a gun as a gift from Jerzy and carelessly shots her mother paralyzing her. They bring in housekeeper Jane Phillips (Shelley Winters). Det. Jake Durham (Glenn Ford) is investigating Katy and the shooting.

The opening has a Christ-like figure doing an exposition to a bunch of bald-headed kids about an intergalactic battle of good and evil. Then John Huston walks in. That's some crazy drugs these people are taking. I'm tempted to claim this is a B-movie but the A-list cast belies its first rate intentions. The writing is a mess. Giulio Paradisi's directing is a mishmash of styles and ideas. I admire the spirit of abandon of this movie. It has a healthy dose of horror with a child and her superpowers like The Omen. The sci-fi motif is campy. This is weirdly fascinating despite it loopy story. It's definitely not a good movie but I kept watching anyways.

This oddball midnight movie is getting a re-release and eventual DVD courtesy of the Alamo Drafthouse.

It's about an evil little girl, who is so evil that John Huston and his pacifist army of intergalactic bald yoga practitioners arrive from space to stop her. Meanwhile Lance Henriksen is the evil boyfriend of her clueless, innocent mother, who sold his soul to the satanic forces nurturing her in a Faustian bargain for...a basketball coach position.

Which leads to the early and highly memorable slo-mo basketball set-piece, easily one of the most unique choices of setting for a horror film sequence I've ever seen!

The atmosphere of this weird, weird film alternates between genuinely and oddly poetic (mostly thanks to the music), pure B-movie cheese, and unintentional hilarity. It's one of the strangest films I've ever seen, but that's not a bad thing in this case. If you give yourself over to its strange charms, this is some kind of consciousness-expanding experience.

Will you like it? There are folks who seek out these sorts of bizarre, unique B-movies. You know who you are. At the very least, you should this film an object of curiosity.

Somehow, and for some reason, John Huston, Glenn Ford, Franco Nero (as Jesus Christ), Shelley Winters, Lance Henriksen, Sam Peckinpah, Mel Ferrer and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are all in this movie.

I find it hard to believe any U.S. distributor would actually take the time to release this to theaters, though the IMDb says that more than one handled this movie in theatrical release! True, the movie boasts an all-star cast, though looking at their brief screen time, it seems just about all these stars knocked off their scenes in not more than a couple of days.

It must be noted that the U.S. print is cut; I've heard from one source that the Italian print does make somewhat more sense. All I can do is judge this particular cut - which makes NO sense at all! People make schemes that are never explained, weird things happen for seemingly no purpose at all... it's a BIG mess! One example is with Italian superstar Franco Nero, who (because of the editing) only gets to appear for about 30 seconds at the end of the movie!

I will admit that at the very least you can salvage a decent number of unintended laughs. Not only is the movie so insane and incoherent that you can't help but laugh out loud, there are some individual delirious scenes that are wacked-out as well. The skating rink scene... John Huston impersonating a babysitter... John Huston playing pong with the mysterious girl (though it's clear that it's a one player pong game on the TV screen)... Shelley Winters overacting... and more. It's not a constantly hilarious experience, and you're bound to get frustrated to a degree with the garbled storyline, but the experience can't be seen as a total loss as well.

The plot, as I hopefully understand it, is that Satan (or Sateen, as this film calls him) fathers children with supernatural powers. One of these children is 8 year-old Katy, who has telekinetic powers and a heavy Southern drawl. An intergalactic traveler called The Visitor must battle the child for the fate of the universe....or something like that. There's also some stuff about an evil hawk, some bald aliens, and a crazy-eyed Jesus with a bad blonde wig.

Nonsensical Italian-made claptrap that combines '70s fascinations with the occult and aliens. It's an awful movie that rips off many better movies, made watchable by some striking imagery and interesting casting. John Huston, Lance Henriksen, Sam Peckinpah, Mel Ferrer, Shelly Winters, and Glenn Ford are all in this. That says more about the state of their respective careers at the time than it does about the quality of this production. Incoherent but good for some laughs. Dig that terribly out of place soundtrack, too.

Kathy Collins is no ordinary eight year old girl.Indeed,she is unique,carrying within her the power of Sateen,an inter-spacial force of immense magnitude.Katy's primary mission on Earth is to carry these genes forward,a task accomplished by convincing her mother Barbara to bear a similarly endowed male child with whom Kathy would eventually mate."The Visitor" makes no sense.It plays like insane mix of such occult films as "Rosemary's Baby","The Exorcist" and "The Omen" but also a tribute to such sci-fi classics as "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".There are so many disconnected plot elements for example aliens wandering through the desert,giant green clouds billowing up from nowhere or the sky turning the color of blood,but the action is fast paced and some surreal images are quite psychedelic.6 out of 10.