I am...to reference another viewer's shocked remarks at how one could say anything defamatory about this film...appalled at just the opposite. This film is in a word quite ludicrous. The film opens with John Huston in another world needing to come down and bring back a child. We then meet the kid and her mother and the man who wants to marry her. Yes, there is a lot of religious allegory here. Just because allegory is used does not make this profound or deep. It isn't. It has a story with many, many flaws. Lack of coherence being the biggest. Characters are never fully explained. Motivation for characters are never fully explained. Scenes cut from one to another with virtually no transition. The editor for this film must have been either blind or drunk. It is so choppy and incoherent at times as to suggest that several men directed it. Ovidio Assonitis, you might remember the brain behind such great films like Beyond the Door(Chi Sei) and Piranha II: The Spawning, wrote this Italian rubbish whilst another gets "credit" for directing it. I will concede that had more effort been given to fleshing out the story and had the producers picked a real editor and had a real score been made for the film rather than that awful 70s-like soundtrack used and had some more realistic special effects other than blue screens and the like been used - then, yes, this might have been somewhat decent. But you know what? They didn't. What we have here is a weird, highly implausible, very incoherent picture with a cast of famous actors looking quite foolish. John Huston looks quite grandfatherly as the man/angel(?) coming to Earth to find this child. Huston looks lethargic and weary. After having seen this film, he had every right to look and feel that way. Maybe they should have asked him for some advice with direction. Hey, Sam Peckinpah has a small role too. With all that experience why not ask? What could it have hurt? The young actress playing the bratty child is Paige Conner, and she does quite well as an annoying kid you want to see flee the screen as soon as possible. She emits profanity, a trademark Assonitis used with other child actors in Chi Sei with equal ability, with ease to Glenn Ford in what can only be termed as a throw-away role. Shelley Winters is here as some important person. God only knows who. She sings "momma's gonna make shortening bread" about ten times and slaps the kid in the face. Mel Ferrer and Lance Henrikson play heavys. Johanne Nail plays the mother, and she goes through so much that in any other film she would have been dead after the first reel. In here she is shot, paralyzed, pushed into a gigantic fish tank, pulled and then dropped down stairs, and is choked with wire. Oh, and by the way, she manages to be impregnated and have an abortion too. What a woman! Nail, to her credit, is pretty good as she does manage to keep a straight face throughout. Pity, I wasn't able to. Many scenes stand out as being quite absurd. My favorites are: the girl skating on ice like a maniacal Dorothy Hamil and the bird scene where death from above takes the form of pigeons with a vengeance. A totally ridiculous film in every sense. And yes, Franco Nero does indeed have a cameo at the end as some kind of Christ figure. Ooh! That was awfully clever huh? Phew!
Review of The Visitor
