Stridulum

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.

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.

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.

Truly it saddens and astounds me how few comments (save ONE) of The Visitor are so drastically poor and give the impression of a commonly terrible low budget waste of time. Am I experiencing reality on such a drastically different

level or are people so cinematically ignorant it really

makes little sense to even bother living in this world (or this dimension) anymore? This film is brilliant beyond words. I repeat, this film is brilliant beyond words. Perhaps most of the viewers in here had only seen the badly chopped incomplete version of this film? (later released on video by HBO) If so it's an absolute tragedy,

the later video release had missing shots in sequences

which were among the best.

Ok, so this isn't an 'intelligent' 'coherent' prominently

received film in the realm of Friedkins Exorcist or Donners' Omen. I can say one thing, it is every bit as

entertaining and brilliant in it's own way. Why can't people see art for what it is? There are so many different forms of it. Is this a planet of completely inept, insipid, ignorant, robotically conformed brainwashed humans?

I am relieved to know that other people found The Visitor as confusing as we did. Over the years, whenever my husband and I have had some reason to mention this movie, we always call it "That weird movie with Jesus in a turtleneck." We spent hours afterwards trying to understand the plot; we never got as far as even trying to understand the meaning.

We went to see because it had such a good cast. The previews suggested it had a supernatural theme, which appealed to us. It was a mistake. We should have stayed home and rotated the mattresses.

I can watch really bad movies without a shudder. I even rather like very bad movies. But The Visitor is in a class by itself. It made absolutely no sense - none. I have read that part of the problem is bad editing. I would hope so. I hate to think that so many fine actors would waste their time on this mess as it is.