Nineteen seventy-nine’sThe Visitor begins with an on-screen message thanking the governor of Georgia and mayor of Atlanta for their “helpful assistance” in the making of the film. Attached to any other movie, such comments would be seen as appreciative, and while I’m sure the producers of the film are grateful for the city’s cooperation, the note in this case can retroactively be read as an apology.

Part of a late-’70s trend in European film production whereby independent producers would essentially co-opt American genre successes for grindhouse gentrification,The Visitor is unique in that while it fails in most every traditional respect with regard to narrative clarity or construction, it doesn’t fall short as either entertainment or as a piece of craftsmanship. In fact, it excels at both, and as a result endures as one of the era’s most indefinable, inconceivably progressive pieces of cinematic nonsense.

Directed by Giulio Paradisi, an Italian television director working under the pseudonym Michael J. Paradise (because we like our European-flavored schlock served up by Anglophilic hands, apparently), the film is built around a ridiculous framing device featuring a Christ-like figure (Franco Nero) who summons an interstellar prophet (John Huston) to stop a young girl (Paige Conner) and her mother (Joanna Nail) from spreading the literal and figurative seed of the evil, unseen Santeen. Subtlety, if you have yet to ascertain, isn’t a primary concern here.

Somewhat inevitably, the film all but abandons this setup as we proceed to careen between negligible asides and elaborate set pieces which bring these and a good half-dozen more characters (played by an unmatched ensemble including Shelley Winters, Glenn Ford, and, why not, Sam Peckinpah) together across the Peach State’s urban expanse. The original script by Lou Comici, commissioned with no knowledge of who would ultimately direct, was extensively reworked by Paradisi, and it shows. Assimilating devices and sequences straight from Hollywood’s horror vault (there are obvious lifts of everything fromThe Birds toThe Omen toClose Encounters of the Third Kind),The Visitor exists as a kind of hodgepodge of other, more successful genre entries, but in its playful, some might say ignorant, retrofitting of its predecessors, the film is satisfyingly irreverent, even invigorating.

For all his stupefying narrative gymnastics, Paradisi is nothing if not a talented stylist. Among other characteristics, he has a penchant for technically challenging tracking shots and tricky camera moves. Many sequences establish a displaced perspective, positioning the camera behind objects (often times banisters, fences, or shutters), adding to the visual tension as Paradisi and cinematographer Ennio Guarnieri glide their lens between various bits of action.

A centerpiece ice-skating sequence set within a giant shopping mall is particularly impressive, as the demon-seed schoolgirl ducks, dodges, and eventually disposes of her assailants in an array of superhuman feats of strength. Paradisi positions himself and his camera within the rink, and in a series of moves which predicts nothing less than what Martin Scorsese does with a boxing ring inRaging Bull, he appears to broaden and constrict the coordinates of the space, changing angles and widening the audience’s viewpoint with each setup.

The Visitor’s climatic action scene, which brings together the daughter, the mother she’s crippled, and the visiting deity in an absurd display of avian home invasion that even Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t have dreamt up, is equally notable, the practical effects imperfect but effective in their resourcefulness. Even the bookending sequences which seem to take place on an alien planet otherwise unmentioned employ makeshift diopter effects and in-camera experiments which call to mind Brian De Palma as quickly as Raúl Ruiz.

But despite these stylistic similarities and the film’s positioning as act of blatant genre pillaging,The Visitor’s closest contemporary may actually be the work of Chilean provocateur Alejandro Jodorowsky. Like that celebrated cult figure’s ambitiously mounted and occasionally nonsensical output,The Visitor is a similarly acid-damaged, hallucinatory audio-visual assault, equal parts spiritual allegory and sensory affront. If it lacks Jodorowsky’s singular thematic focus and unforgiving way of reflecting those ideas via imagery and montage, it more than makes up for it in synapse-snapping, forehead-slapping imagination, which cast and crew makes no attempt to harness. It thus never even begins to allow itself to strain under its many concepts and for better or worse manages to stand as both a testament to unbridled creativity and as a supreme example of cross-continental exploitation run amok.

Image/Sound

Arrow Video’s 2160p 4K restoration ofThe Visitor, sourced from the original 35mm camera negative, looks phenomenal, a significant improvement over the version previously available on Drafthouse’s2014 Blu-ray, and doing full justice to Ennio Guarnieri’s ravishingly moody cinematography. The most noticeable uptick concerns the color palette, with those oranges, blues, and greens veritably popping off the screen. Black levels are also deeper and denser. The English LPCM mono mix sounds great, despite some occasional hiss in the upper end, nicely conveying composer Franco Micalizzi’s booming, portentous score.

Extras

Arrow provides a satisfying selection of extras, both old and new. Carried over from the aforementioned Drafthouse release are three fairly short interviews with actor Lance Henriksen (the funniest), writer Lou Comici, and DP Ennio Guarnieri. The commentary track from podcasters BJ and Harmony Colangelo is mostly jokey riffing on whatever is happening on screen at the moment, with a modicum of sociopolitical analysis. A pair of visual essays are much better in this regard: Critic Meagan Navarro convincingly placesThe Visitor at the intersection of religious horror and science fiction, while critic Willow Catelyn Maclay delves into the gender and sexual politics of the film’s take on abortion. Lastly, there’s an illustrated booklet with incisive essays from critics Marc Edward Heuck, Richard Kadrey, Craig Martin, and Mike White that explore various aspects of the film, its production, and its reception.

Overall

A mad mélange of genres and cinematic reference points,The Visitor gets a glorious 4K makeover and some solid extras from Arrow Video.