As the man behind Jaws knockoff Tentacles and Beyond the Door, a demon possession movie so suspiciously similar to The Exorcist that it sparked a lawsuit, B-movie maestro Ovidio G. Assonitis was certainly no stranger to the art of imitation. Even so, his script for 1979’s The Visitor took his plundering to new heights, its obvious nods to everything from the telekinetic evil of The Omen and the extraterrestrial blinding lights of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the demonic pregnancy of Rosemary’s Baby and the fatal bird-pecking of The Birds playing out like a Déjà vu of horror’s greatest hits.
Yet thanks to the phantasmagoric direction of Giulio Paradisi, who adopted the slightly more Tinseltown-friendly name of Michael J. Paradise, those so blatantly borrowed from were likely to have been left too bamboozled to start lawyering up. The Visitor, released in America 45 years ago, is often more akin to the avant-garde hallucinations of Chilean auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky than the cheaply made exploitation films of the Assonitis stable. The tone is set by the opening scene, in which a Christ-like figure (Italian cinema icon Franco Nero) delivers an expository speech on a desolate acid-tripped landscape populated by bald children.
