the visitor: he jodorowskies, he misses!

*SPOILER ALERT*

(1979. dir: Michael J. Paradise) In his interview in the extras, Lance Henriksen says he thinks the explanation for this welter of confusion (or camp-classic, depending on your perspective) is that the Italian director had worked for Fellini and was attempting his own "Fellini", landing wide of the mark. I see no Fellini here: I think he was trying to "Jodorowsky", and missing by a country mile.

You've got Franco Nero in book-end appearances as a Christ-like teacher/storyteller. You've got roomfuls of pale skinheads, some of them kids, some young adults. You've got an exploding basketball which throws an important game to Atlanta. A woman with alien DNA who gives birth to super-mutant children. A bad-seed evil mutant girl who bears a resemblance to the young Linda Blair (even wearing her satin jacket from Roller Boogie) and keeps an attack-kestrel named Squeaky as a pet. She gets a toy bird from her aunt as a birthday gift but it morphs inside the box into a handgun with which she shoots her mom, then she does gymnastics while her mom is undergoing life-or-death surgery.

You have opaque cubes filled with moving silhouettes on top of a building; John Huston walks amongst them, looking regal. You have Sam Peckinpah as a philanthropist doctor who saves the world by performing an abortion. Lance Henriksen as an evil basketball magnate (what? who's ever heard of those?) and Mel Ferrer as the ringleader of the evil aliens who are apparently trying to take down the world. Glenn Ford is a cop who has his eye taken out by Squeaky while he's driving and ends up in a ball of flame. Shelley Winters is a housekeeper-slash-spiritual-sentinel, who holds her own against the devil-spawn child and tolls the death-knell for poor Squeaky after he turns into a hawk and attacks the mom.

The mom has been paralyzed by the gunshot, but adjusts to life in a wheelchair with remarkable rapidity, managing to move around, remain stunningly dressed and maquillaged without assistance, still drives a car and manages to climb in and out on her own, somehow folding the wheelchair and depositing it neatly in back before doing so. The best part may be a battle in a mall ice-rink in which the demon-child takes on a thuggish band of teenaged boys, making short work of them in the time it takes John Huston to walk down an endless flight of stairs. There's another showdown, between Huston and the little girl, amidst funhouse mirrors ala the Lady from Shanghai, and, not surprisingly, it's nowhere near as gripping as the original.

In the climactic scenes, John Huston orchestrates a groovy light-show in the skies which culminates in an army of pigeons who take vengeance on the little girl, while the basketball magnate gets skewered by a flying metal bird-sculpture.

I've left out some psychedelia and some chase scenes, some talking and a lot of hyperventilating, but you get the gist. It's quintessential seventies; check out the haircuts! Yes, I've given away a ton of spoilers, but "spoilers" is a misnomer here. The point is not enjoying the unfolding of the plot, because there is no "plot" in the sense of a cohesive, logical story-progression. This is meant as a double-bill alongside something like Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby. You get baked with your friends and laugh at it.