Twofer Tuesday! The Visitor.

This is a strange, strange film.  I continued to chip away at my economy sized jug of Rebel Yell, check the "Firestorm" entry for my full review.  I popped in "The Visitor", yet another of my Yarmouth yard sale finds.  This film is almost great.  It isn't even good, really, but it shoots very high and misses.  There are little pockets of coolness here and there, though.  The music is very cool, first off.  

The opening scene is really bizarre, with cloaked figures hanging out in a really strangely beautiful hell or "other realm".  We cut to a basketball game.  A young Lance Henriksen has a basketball team: the "Atlanta Rebels".  They are playing the San Francisco "Miners".   He's watching the game with his beautiful girlfriend, played by Joanne Nail.   A reporter asks Lance where his money comes from, and he evades the question.  Finally, he says "god."  A little girl with dope stunner shades uses evil powers to make the Miners lose the game due to an exploding basketball hoop.  There is some really interesting creepy cinematography and strange editing.  

Turns out, Henriksen has been elected by a creepy secret rich guy society to knock up his girlfriend.  They tell him that they have insured that he will have a successful basketball team, but he is yet to give her a son, which is what they need, because she is the only human to have

 "his" genes.  

I guessed that "He" was Satan, and I guess he was, but due to the psychedelic nature of this film, I was thinking "he" was an alien for awhile.  Maybe they meant to say that God and the Devil are aliens.  

There are some really cool and bizarre sequences, insane plot twists and some good old fashioned mayhem here and there.  Overall, the movie unravels towards the end and makes little sense.  I don't want to give too much away, but Jesus appears at the end.  And they don't make it clear that it is Jesus, its just a guy with a beard and blue eyes.  But the camera lingers on him so much that finally I decided it was Jesus.  

Apparently Sam Peckinpah is in this movie, I didn't even realize this until the end credits.  Must be a very minor role.  This movie is too disorganized and bizarre to really warrant a recommendation, but I enjoyed it overall.  Definitely an interesting premise that isn't explored to its full potential.   There are little glimpses of a great avant garde horror film hidden in the corners of this movie, but as a whole it is too disjointed to be a good one.  

Joanne Nail