A B-Movie Master Delivered A Trippy Ripoff Of Sci-Fi Classics

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.

Helpfully providing the context for all the madness ahead, the guru’s crash course in interplanetary, supernatural warfare explains that a devilish figure named Zatteen emigrated to Earth and was slain by his godlike nemesis, Yahweh, many centuries ago. However, this didn’t stop his unholy spirit from wreaking havoc through a bloodline that’s now reached a blonde, pigtailed eight-year-old girl.

Yes, Katy Collins (Paige Conner) may look like she couldn’t melt butter, but as first showcased courtside at an NBA game in which she sports some ridiculously oversized Elton John-esque spectacles, her malevolent powers are strong enough to stop Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in his tracks. And the Satanic tween has more on her mind than fixing basketball results, like forcing her poor, unknowing mom, Barbara (Joanne Nail), to birth the missing piece of the Zatteen-resurrecting jigsaw puzzle.

She’s assisted in her mission by Barbara’s boyfriend Raymond (Lance Henriksen), a sporting magnate whose monumental wealth derives not from God as claimed, but a shadowy group of Satan worshippers. Their most dangerous weapon is undoubtedly Katy, a youngster with the superhuman strength to hurl several teenage boys out of an ice rink, the bravado to tell ill-fated chief detective Jake Durham (Glenn Ford) to go f*** himself, and the venom to repeatedly maim her own mother.

Strangled, kicked in the face, “accidentally” paralyzed via gunshot at Katy’s birthday party, impregnated against her will by an otherworldly life force, and sent hurtling through a fish tank, poor Barbara is put through the wringer like no other. The sinister grins etched upon Katy’s face throughout each ordeal, particularly when her mom is about to be inseminated, are truly unnerving.

Paradisi heightens the sense of menace with several choices you wouldn’t expect from an Assonitis production. During the ice-skating scene, for example, he points the lens through various stairwells, lending the centerpiece a creepy, voyeuristic edge, while the basketball game is shot in a gritty, docu-realist style. The Italian film school graduate had previously been guided as an actor by Federico Fellini, and it’s clear he took on the legend’s flair for composition.

Paradisi’s impressive background may explain how he was able to procure such a considerable wealth of talent for such an unashamed mish-mash. Academy Award winner Shelley Winters plays nanny Jane Phillips, a slap-happier Mary Poppins who instantly recognizes the evil in the child she’s hired to care for. Even more unexpectedly, influential filmmaker Sam Peckinpah pops up as the doctor who helps to abort his ex-wife's sinister fetus. And Jerzy, the heroic deity tasked with thwarting Katy’s plan, is portrayed by bona fide member of Hollywood royalty John Huston.

The latter ends up saving the day, using an army of doves to dispatch Raymond and finally put pay to Katy’s reign of terror. The film stops short of executing its kid, instead exorcizing her evil, shaving her head, and sending her to the “good place,” presumably for a life of vague philosophizing.

Unlike her devil-child predecessors Damien and Regan, though, Katy was never seen again. Despite her impressive performance, Conner’s acting career was restricted to sitcom cameos and bit parts like “Girl in T-shirt.” Paradisi pivoted to comedy, and Assonitis went back to making conventional carbon copies (see 1982’s Piranha II: The Spawning). Although a modest hit in Europe, a Stateside butchering that made matters even more incomprehensible ensured there wasn’t much clamoring for a follow-up.

The Visitor, then, remains a true one-off: an obvious rehashing of better genre pieces that nevertheless carved out its own unhinged path, a low-budget film with a top-tier cast, and a European exploitation that at times possessed the craftsmanship of New Hollywood. They truly don’t make ‘em like this anymore.