Streaming Availability: Youtube
...Oh man, where do I even begin with a movie like this?
In 1974, Ovidio G. Assonitis directed a movie called Beyond the Door - we've already discussed it. It was a mixture of a Rosemary's Baby plot with scares stolen from The Exorcist. However, Assonitis was not done with surreal takes on Hollywood devil films. Five years later he returned to that same place with The Visitor, now as producer. (Though I should mention, Assonitis was notorious for secretly doing both jobs, James Cameron has some stories from his time making Piranha II: The Spawning.) Between '74 and '79, something enormous had happened that changed world history forever. That was, of course, the release of George Lucas' Star Wars. Everybody wanted to make a SciFi movie now, even guys still trying to make Exorcist rip-offs half a decade later.
The only issue is that all these devil movies are in some way or another Biblical. How do you fit space ships and lasers into stories about God and Christ? Well, as it turns out, the Seventies were a perfect time for this. UFO occultism was at a high point. (Also, no, I do not think there is much difference between 20th century aliens and earlier magic esotericism.) Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods? would be a decade old by the time The Visitor was made, creating the Ancient Aliens pseudoscience. The old gods were dead after the tumult of the Sixties, maybe we needed creators riding flying saucer now. Also, the Seventies were a high point for telekinesis ideas, a new form of magic. Finally, we just around the corner from a big rise in cosmic horror in the Eighties. Phantasm, also in 1979, would have scenes in an alternate desert dimension, so why not The Visitor too?
Basically The Visitor is a movie that only could have been released in 1979. And I don't think it made sense to people in 1979 either.
The Visitor is not about rewriting our history to replace J.C. with E.T., rather it just puts God and Satan on spaceships. The mythology is explained to us by an enigmatic blonde-haired blue-eyed Jesus (Franco Nero) sitting in a white room with a collection of bald children disciples. If this sounds like incredible imagery, get ready, more is coming. Many thousands of years ago, in space, two characters named Zatteen and Yahweh did battle. Zatteen was defeated and imprisoned, but escaped to Earth. His powerful psychic powers passed into the human genome, still arising every so often with in scary children with TK powers. An old man in a safari suit (none other than director John Huston!) walks into the room with Christ, announcing that one of Zatteen's descendants has been found, and it is a little girl in Atlanta, Katy Collins (Paige Conner).
This mythology is interesting for a couple reasons. Obviously Zatteen is Satan and Yahweh is... well, Yahweh, the Canaanite storm god that would one day become capital-G God. There's a taboo in Judaism against saying God's real name, I don't think he'll mind today if I'm talking about the characters in this movie. (Lord, you may strike me down if you disagree.) This story of Satan escaping heaven/outer space is stands out though, because it sounds alike like the myth of the Grigori, the Watchers. That's an entirely different story of fallen angels from the more famous Lucifer. These would be characters from the non-canonical Book of Enoch who mated with human women and sired a race of giants, the Nephilim. There's a lot of cool, weird stuff in Biblical apocrypha, and The Visitor is a cool, weird movie.
Neither Zatteen or Yahweh appear in person. Zatteen plans to be reborn through the son of a woman named Barbara (Joanne Nail), Paige's mother, all in an elaborate eugenics program. Imagine an Antichrist Kwisatz Haderach. John Huston is never explicitly called "Yahweh", and it is unclear if he is God at all. He goes by the name of "Jerzy Colsowicz" (note the initials). But I love the idea that the director Key Largo and The Treasure of Sierra Madre might be God himself in The Visitor.
A lot is going on in this film. We have an evil little girl with psychic powers who can make Kareem Abdul-Jabbar explode. There's John Huston wandering around the streets of Atlanta while a jazzy soundtrack written by Franco Micalizzi fires an exploding horn section all around him with loud crescendo after crescendo. Lance Henriksen, still serving Satan after his role in Omen II, is playing Barbara's boyfriend and Katy's adopted father. He mostly spends the movie attending sinister meetings in Southern mansions. He sold his soul to own the Atlanta Hawks, and I think Zatteen screwed him. The goal is to get Barbara pregnant, but she values her sexual independence and will not be a part of it.
The Visitor is Italian so you expect strangeness. Thing is, it is not always weird in Italian ways. The sound was recorded on set, the cast is fantastic, all American. Old trophies of Hollywood like Shelley Winters, Glenn Ford and Mel Ferrer are side characters. Sam Peckinpah is in here. Even the two relatively unknown actresses at the heart of the movie, Paige Conner and Joanne Nail, are very good. Things get very Italian once one of Katy's birthday presents magically becomes a gun and she paralyzes her mother with a bullet through the spine. Or when a demon hawk flies around picking out Glenn Ford's eyes. A dues ex machina by way of John Huston ends the movie with an army of doves coming down through a Close Encounters of the Third Kind light show. Also John Huston plays Pong.
It is a trip.
This is a really great-looking movie too. The Visitor photographs an amazing collection of these ultra-modernist spaces in Atlanta, including the Hawks' old arena, the Omni. This was decades before Atlanta became anything like the center of Hollywood that is now. The cinematography is remarkable and experimental at times. There's a lot of symmetry in the shots, there's a lot of shots filmed from up and above characters peering through fences or lattices. A UFO-like abduction staged on a dark-road with a truck that is absolutely terrifying. I love the edit too. They accomplish a lot by having a montage of Barbara barely surviving her gunshot while Katy happily does a gymnastics routine. You can do a lot of storytelling and character work without dialog.
This is a bizarre movie but I think The Visitor is a great movie. It is very strange, it is unique in a dozen ways, and it is very cool. It's even a remarkably feminist movie. Barbara gets really badly abused over and over in The Visitor but loses never strength. After her abduction she is made to be pregnant with the Antichrist, and she just aborts it. Simple as that. Nobody is all that worried. God is in this movie and he's okay with it. I think the pro-choice argument is done better in The Visitor than in Beyond the Door, in that it is not an argument at all, simply a part of life. Yahweh is a lot wiser here than his disciples on my Earth make him out to be.
Next Time! This is the start of a little unit in our series about SciFi takes on demons. Where better to go than Hellraiser?
No comments:
Post a Comment