THE VISITOR (1979)
Did you catch the Lakers game last night? It was a nail-biter. With three seconds to spare, LeBron James jumped to dunk the deciding basket when suddenly, the damn hoop exploded. Okay, that didn't actually happen in reality, but it did happen in The Visitor. Replace LeBron with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and kablooey! It's never mentioned again and no one seems to think it's a big deal. Explosions are fixtures of your average basketball game, I suppose. That scene is an unmarred reduction of the totality of The Visitor. It's a kinky, whimsical bite of the 70's, although it's not as cinematic as The Omen or The Exorcist.
The Visitor wants to be as weighty as those genre paradigms, but it's deliriously tipsy. In fact, if it were a person, it would be a falldown drunk. There are redeeming qualities here, namely the actors forced at gunpoint to recite amphigory dialogue (I had to laugh at a prepubescent Paige Connor telling her mother to "make love" with Lance Henriksen so that she could have a baby brother). Lance is detached, but he's still Lance. John Huston gives the best performance as Jerzy, an interdimensional...warrior? Wizard? Shelley Winters, Mel Ferrer, and Glenn Ford round out the cast of confused onlookers. Of all the "evil tyke" movies I've seen, this is probably the worst. And yet, it's entertaining enough for a rainy Tuesday night.
No comments:
Post a Comment