To attempt to explain the plot of The Visitor would be like trying to draw a portrait of a frog while it was being liquefied in a blender. There’s just no way. Made by an Italian crew and shot in Atlanta, Georgia, this 1979 sci-fi/horror schlockfest is one of those flicks that has to be seen to be believed. Words won’t do the madness justice.

Here’s what I can tell you: The Visitor stars some A-list actors that must have been looking for some quick lunch money, including John Huston, Glenn Ford (is that a herpes sore on his lower lip?), Shelly Winters, Lance Henriksen and Mel Ferrer. It also features a cameo by Sam Peckinpah. Everyone involved seems heavily medicated. The film twerks along like it was edited by a blind man with a meat cleaver. The musical score is full of a lot of bombast signifying nothing. Every time Huston appears on screen an orchestra blasts an over-the-top “Hawaii Five-O “-like theme that probably herniated the entire horn section. It makes absolutely no sense because Huston doesn’t do much more than lurch stiff-legged through the movie like a man who’s taken a dump in his slacks. I guess the director was so thrilled to have Huston on the set he instructed the composer, Franco Micalizzi, to herald the crusty old actor’s every appearance with God-like fanfare.

With its cast of zoned-out actors, cheesy special effects, incoherent plot and surreal dialog, The Visitor is a bizarre and surprising experience that manages to be awful while keeping you in some kind of hypnagogic thrall. There are moments so wildly improbable and disconnected from any conventional type of narrative that the movie veers into the very rare space inhabited by the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky (“El Dopo”), Luis Buñuel , David Lynch and John Waters. Of course, none of this is intentional but it’s the kind of happy accident that makes really bad movies butt up against really great ones. I mean could John Waters have come up with anything as inspired and demented as Shelly Winters dressed up in a maid’s uniform singing “Shortnin’ Bread”? Well, The Visitor‘s director Giulio Paradisi did and for that he has earned my begrudging love and so has his film. That and the fact that the first few minutes of The Visitor is an eerie bad acid trip that is genuinely unsettling and super evocative of Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain.
 

 
The Visitor is one of those demented flicks that falls into the “so bad it’s good” category and films like that are rarer than people realize. It takes a certain genius to fabricate cinematic fever dreams this wonderfully warped. It made me giddy. Enjoy it with some Thorazine-laced popcorn.

The Visitor is being distributed by the always reliably weird Drafthouse Films. It has already opened in New York, L.A. and Austin and should be opening soon in a theater near you or on VOD. See the release schedule here