The Visitor opens on a plane of unreality in which a force of good (John Huston) comes face to face with a force of evil. When the evil flings off its sacramental robe, it reveals it has taken the form of a little girl. Cut to a different plane of existence: Italian actor Franco Nero, in Christ-like garb, tells a group of bald disciples the mystical backstory concerning these warring forces. My eyes glazed over at this long, dull explanation, which is probably why I had so much trouble following the rest of the movie.
Maybe I would have been lost anyway, but a great deal of The Visitor suddenly made sense in the end. I hoped to be taken on a cosmic trip, but with exposition like Nero’s, the film is like winning a free vacation, but finding out you have to listen to a timeshare pitch first. I’m not saying it’s a bad movie because it’s actually quite good for borrowing so heavily from so many different sources. (Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen came to mind for me. Others have compared it to everything from The Exorcist to Star Wars.) Despite its obvious influences, you’ve never see anything like it.
Following its dreamlike prologue, the audience is whisked away to a basketball game in Atlanta, Georgia. When the away team nearly turns the score over in the final seconds, a little girl in the front row uses her supernatural powers to make the basketball explode in the player’s hands. (No one seems to think it’s weird that the basketball blew up like a Tannerite-stuffed piñata.)
The eight year old girl responsible is accompanied by her mother, played by Joanne Nail (Switchblade Sisters). Nail’s character is being courted by Lance Henriksen, the owner of the basketball team. Henriksen proposes to the girl’s mother, who refuses his offer despite creepy persistence. We soon learn Henriksen is an agent of evil when we see him in the boardroom of rich and powerful Illuminati types. The mysterious figures, led by Mel Ferrer, remind Henriksen that their evil plot hinges on Nail getting pregnant again.
Meanwhile John Huston’s character arrives on Earth. He can freely hop between realms, but requires a commercial airliner to take him to Atlanta. When the little girl discovers her arch-nemesis is now on Earth, she angrily uses her Omen-like powers to turn a birthday gift into a loaded gun and promptly shoots her mother in the spine. This “accident” leads to a couple more surprisingly high-profile talents: Shelly Winters and Glenn Ford, who play the new nanny and a police detective. Eventually the film will introduce Nail’s ex-husband, a doctor played by Sam Peckinpah.
The problem with The Visitor (and I’m nitpicking here because the more I think about it, the more I like it) is it has too much plot for what it wants to be. And it’s a plot that will be just a little too familiar for fans of pre-Halloween horror. I usually love movies like this and I’m no stranger to psychedelic journeys, but no one’s asking the directors of acid films to stitch their visual exercises together with coherent—but ultimately pointless—plots. I just feel The Visitor would work a lot better if it didn’t try to be so damned routine in between its short bursts of wonderful lunacy.
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