6.1 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
An intergalactic warrior joins a cosmic Christ figure in battle against a demonic eight-year-old and her pet hawk while the fate of the universe hangs in the balance.
Starring: John Huston, Mel Ferrer, Glenn Ford, Lance Henriksen, Joanne NailHorror | 100% |
Surreal | 9% |
Sci-Fi | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono
English SDH
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Digital copy (as download)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 2.5 | |
Extras | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
One man's trash may be another's treasure, but some films are both at the same time. Such is the case with the 1979 curiosity The Visitor (also known as Stridulum), which was cut to ribbons by its original American distributor and gradually attained cult status in the following years. Horror publisher Code Red issued the full-length version on DVD in 2010, but now Drafthouse Films has acquired the rights and is releasing what is billed as a restoration on Blu-ray, after a theatrical run in 2013. Unlike, say, Plan 9 from Outer Space, which is clearly the work of an auteur with an identifiable style, The Visitor seems to have arisen from some sort of collective unconscious of cinematic inspiration (if you're a fan) or incompetence (if you're not). But in either case it has a train wreck fascination, at least in part because it features such major talents as John Huston, Glenn Ford, Shelly Winters, Mel Ferrer, Lance Henriksen, Franco Nero and, in a single scene, director Sam Peckinpah (who was supposed to have a bigger part, but couldn't remember his lines). The impresario behind the project was producer Ovidio G. Assonitis, a prolific creator of shlock whose chief claim to fame was firing James Cameron from Piranha 2: The Spawning, during which Cameron experienced the fever dream that became The Terminator. According to screenwriter Lou Comici, Assonitis started with the general idea of ripping off The Exorcist. But he'd hired a director, Giulio Paradisi (renamed "Michael J. Paradise" for more American-friendly credits), who'd started as an A.D. to Fellini on 8˝ (and would never let anyone forget it). Paradisi popped with ideas for weird visuals, none of which connected to a story. After doing what he could to satisfy the conflicting demands of Paradisi and Assonitis, Comici was fired. Fragments of his screenplay survive in The Visitor, along with contributions by another screenwriter, Robert Mundi, plus whatever the unfortunate editor was able to construct from the clash of wills between Paradisi and Assonitis. The resulting melange looks more like the first two Omen films than The Exorcist, mixed with generous helpings of Rosemary's Baby, The Birds, bits of The Fury and imagery from a low-rent version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Does any of it fit together? Not really. Then again, people said the same thing about 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Drafthouse has not indicated the source for their restoration of The Visitor, but judging from the image on their 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, the source was a print, not the negative, and it was in rough shape. More than a few scratches, nicks, pockmarks and splotches remain, but much has also been cleaned and repaired, because the stability of the image and the color are remarkable. No one will mistake The Visitor for a film shot recently, especially since its many opticals are often grainy in a manner that has all but disappeared in today's world of CG compositing. But it certainly doesn't look like a faded 35mm antique from a revival house. The whites of the Visitor's home world are bright; the colors in Atlanta—at the Sentinels game, in the Collins household, even in the seedy part of downtown Atlanta where Katy and the Visitor play a game of cat-and-mouse—are varied and vivid; and the blacks, while not the best I've seen, are strong enough to keep the image reasonably detailed. The major issue with the image, other than the condition of the source elements, is the soft, somewhat grainy appearance that probably results from working with an element several steps removed from the OCN. This is probably the best that The Visitor has ever looked, and it may be the best that it ever will, but in long and even medium shots, the detail is significantly less resolved than one typically sees in films from this era. Close-ups typically fare much better, unless they involve opticals (e.g., the shots of the Visitor watching the skies from his rooftop HQ). For purposes of this review and its video score, I am assuming that Drafthouse extracted everything they could from the source. Until someone finds a better element, this appears to be the standard. Drafthouse has mastered The Visitor on a BD-25 with an average bitrate of 19.99 Mbps. The number is somewhat low, but the film does have enough still, talky scenes to allow a compressionist to conserve bandwidth for the more demanding passages. If there were compression artifacts, I missed them in the phantasmagoria.
The Visitor was released in mono, which has been reproduced here in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. Unfortunately, lossless treatment cannot do anything to improve the quality of a track that is shrill and fatiguing at the high end. I recommend reducing the volume below your usual listening level. The score by Franco Micalizzi (whose music was heard most recently on the soundtrack of Django Unchained) combines a traditional orchestra with a synthesizer, but the original recording is simply too limited in its dynamic range to make for pleasant listening in a home theater at contemporary levels. The voices are clear and intelligible, although they often have the disembodied quality that will be familiar to any viewer of Italian cinema from the Sixties and Seventies.
As should be obvious by now, The Visitor failed to win me over, but I enjoyed watching performers of the caliber of Huston, Winters, Ford, Ferrer and Henriksen work to make something out of nothing. As for the plot, if you can call it that, it's fascinating to watch it twist, turn, double back and forget where it's going. Then again, in this era of shameless remakes, maybe The Visitor's time has come. Put a mask on the character, rename him after some minor comic book hero, and a major studio would have a summer tentpole. I'm not going to make a recommendation. If you're a fan of gonzo cinema, you already know you want this.
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