Revisiting The Visitor: A Cliffs Notes of Suck

Back in November, I watched the 1979 movie The Vistor, which is a work of science fiction that is maybe also horror and it has birds in it and Shelley Winters plays a character who may or may not be intoxicated the whole time. That’s maybe the most accurate thing I can say about The Visitor. It’s a tough movie that goes from “Oh, wow, this is so bad!” to “Oh, wow, this is so bad,” and the scattered moments of what-the-fuckness don’t quite make up for a plot that so vehemently resists sensible direction. That said, the movie isn’t a complete waste of time, because those what-the-fuck moments really linger with you.

Thus, following the success of my Cliffs Notes version of the also terrible Invitation to Hell (a.k.a. “the worst line readings, the shittiest special effects and all of Susan Lucci’s outfits”), I decided to condense The Visitor down to the best-worst parts, so you can see them, appreciate them and then move on with your life. I’m happy to report that I cut down the original film’s running time of 101 minutes down to just 7:37.

Enjoy!

And no, you’re honestly not missing out of that much. Any of the seemingly unexplained plot points go more or less equally unexplained in the real version. Only now you didn’t have to sit through a stuffy Cinefamily screening to see Lance Henriksen get murdered by a bird.

You may rightly be wondering how a film like this ever gets made. Per the Cinefamily screening (and per my original post), the director was fired and then threatened the producer at gunpoint not only to hire him back but allow him to continue seeing through this collection of weirdness and baffling line readings. And that, my friends, is how a movie like this gets made.

For those who dare, you can rent the full film on iTunes.

Tempo & the Increasingly Troubled Clef

a piacere (“to your pleasure”)

brioso (“lively”)

agitato (“excitedly”)

gentilmente (“gently”)

intimo (“intimately”)

adagissimo (“very slowly and calmly”)

affrettando (“rushed and nervous”)

fuocoso (“fiery”)

irato (“angrily”)

furioso (“furiously”)

bruscamente (“bluntly and abruptly”)

martellato (“as if struck with a hammer”)

decrescendo (“gradually decreasing in volume”)

con dolore (“with pain”)

grave (“seriously”)

pesante (“heavy”)

lontano (“distantly”)

lacrimoso (“mournfully”)

lamentoso (“with lamentation”)

tremolo (“trembling”)

notturno (“like a nocturne, as if intended for night”)

al fine (“to the end”)

espirando (“dying away”)

pianississimo (“as softly as possible”)

senza espressione (“without expression”)

estinto (“extinguished”)

al niente (“to nothing”)

“It Gives Me the Scary Creeps” — The Bold Experiment in Confusion That Is The Visitor

Last week, I watched a Cinefamily screening of The Visitor, a 1979 film-like thing that stars John Huston, Shelley Winters, Glen Ford, Sam Peckinpah and the original Django for no reason that I can tell. It’s a good cast, yes, but the film itself is the kind of mess that results when the director gets fired and then the producer is threatened at gunpoint to not only hire the director back but also give him carte blanche to complete the film in whatever fashion his whackadoodle brain chooses. (That’s the story related to the audience at the beginning of the screening, allegedly shared by the original screenwriter.) At the time The Visitor hit American cinemas, critics accused it of ripping off both The Omen and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but I can’t imagine director Michael J. Paradise saw either of these films nor any other film ever, because this thing defies description — and not in a good way.

Check out the Drafthouse Films trailer:

And here’s a fan-made trailer:

Both prepare you for the kind of surreal, flashy Italian horror movie that I usually go nuts for, but what the trailers don’t tell you is that The Visitor is kind of a piece of shit. After the first half-hour, the visuals can no longer make up for a plot that herka-jerks from a confusing beginning to confusing ending. You wonder what’s going on, then you stop wondering, and then you’re just sitting there, watching characters act without explanation or any clear motive. I stopped caring how weird it got — and yeah, I’m surprised that I just typed that too — because the film’s weirdness never outmatched its suckiness.

It boasts some decent visuals, I’ll admit, and I like the art used to promote its various international releases, even if it promises some sort of galactical, city-destroying eyeball monster that doesn’t appear in the film in any way whatsoever. So here is my public service to the world: I’m going to post all the grabby stills and posters I can find. These plus the two trailers posted above equals an overall more pleasant (and less lengthy) experience than you’d have if you actually sat down and watched The Visitor.

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This last one I actually love. I want to watch the movie that this art represents. I’d also hang this on my wall if I could. I only wish I could find a bigger, higher-resolution version.

Oh, and here’s a random scene I found during my online rummaging. It’s about as representative of the tone of the film as anything else.

You’re welcome.

Bay of Superfluous Titles

Here is a still from the 1971 Mario Bava giallo Twitch of the Death Nerve.

It’s one of the few I’m comfortable posting, because most of the Google image search results for this title yield gruesome results. It’s that kind of movie, but know at least that it pulls off the bloodshed with a certain level of style: The opening scene illustrates my claim nicely: a double murder, sure, but one committed in a formal drawing room, at least. That’s class right there — death amid decor.

Aside from classy murder set pieces and its status as a proto-I Know What You Did Last Summer, Twitch of the Death Nerve is also famous for being released in various markets with a bajillion titles. And I took Wikipedia’s promise of it having “probably more titles than any other movie ever released” as a challenge to collect them all. And here they are — working titles, foreign release titles, and any other possible way this slasher whodunit was marketed at one movie-goer or another.

Twitch of the Death Nerve

Odore di carne (“The Odor of Flesh”)

Cosi imparano a fare i cattivi (“Thus do we live to be evil”)

Antefatto (“Before the Fact”)

Ecologia del delitto (“The Ecology of Crime”)

Reazione a Catena (“Chain Reaction”)

Bahia di Sangre (“Bay of Blood”)

A Bay of Blood

Carnage

Last House on the Left — Part II

Last House — Part II

New House on the Left

Blood Bath

Bloodbath Bay of Blood

Bloodbath Bay of Death

A Mansão da Morte (“The Mansion of Death”)

O Sexo na Sua Forma Mais Violenta (rendered by Google Translate as “Sex in Your Shape More Violent”)

Den blodige bugt (“The Bloody Bay”)

Kravgi tromou (rendered by Google Translate as “Shouts horror”)

O krikos ton eglimaton (rendered by Google Translate as “The Link Crimes”)

Sfagi sto akrogiali tis idonis (rendered by Google Translate as “Massacre at Beaches Pleasure”)

To spiti me ta alysidota eglimata (rendered by Google Translate as “The House with the Stimulus Crimes”)

Chimidoro no irie (rendered by Google Translate as “Irie Bloody,” but I’m guessing it’s more at “Bloody Bay”)

Krwawy obóz (“Blood Camp”)

Blutrausch des Teufels (“Bloodlust of the Devil”)

Im Blutrausch des Satans (“The New Blood of Satan”)

As you may have surmised from watching the opening scene, White People Problems could have been the subtitle to literally any one of these alternate titles. But you have to appreciate the effort on the part of whatever marketer in whatever region sitting and thinking about how they could best trick people into watching a movie about awful people murdering each other in a grand, bloody effort to secure the biggest possible inheritance.

Previously: more fun with bizarre film title translations.

Me Gusta la Banana

I think we have a new contender for worst song ever: the 1984 recording “Banana” by someone calling herself Jane Chiquita.

If the pairing of name and subject matter seem a little on the nose, then you too may be questioning whether this could be a joke. Or maybe it’s just some poor woman’s realization of her banana-centric destiny, at which point she, having completed the task for which she was sent to Earth, simply stopped existing. What I’d like to think — what I’m hoping, really — is that the song is about dicks and the suits in the studio said, “No, Jane, you can’t record a song just about dicks, even though this is Italy,” and so she was all, “Fine. Let’s make it about flesh-colored swords. No, wait — bananas! That’s easier to rhyme.” Because I can’t wrap my head around anyone thinking it would be a good idea just to make a song about how much they like bananas, though it wouldn’t be the first time someone had been tricked into singing about dicks.

Me being shortsighted, I took Latin as my foreign language, and so I can’t be sure what she’s actually singing about? Is this song in Spanish or Italian? Can someone smarter tell me if the lyrics are filthy? Or is it just a celebration of potassium?

Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key

With the Italian giallo films, you can expect three things: breasts, blood and a title consisting of a string of words you would never expect to be the name of a film but which somehow works.

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In many cases, the names vary with releases in different countries and sometimes even in the same country. Thus, l tuo vizio è una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave (Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key) is more title than most movies could ever support, yet it’s actually just one of the handful of titles under which the 1972 thriller was released. Here are all the alternate titles I could find for Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key:

Excite Me!

Eye of the Black Cat

Gently Before She Dies

O pyrgos ton dolofonon (The Tower of Murders)¹

To mystirio tis mavris gatas (The Mystery of the Black Cat)¹

Vicios prohibidos (Forbidden Vices)

Die Nympohmane Killerin (The Nymphomaniac Killer)²

I mean, based on the titles, shouldn’t these all be different movies? (France, for the record, just translated the Italian title directly into French: Ton vice est une chambre close dont moi seul ai la clé.) You may realize that none of these titles really give much of an idea what the film could be about. You may also wonder why foreign language releases would have discarded such a distinct, evocative title, which you may suppose has a direct relation to the plot, because why else would that be the title? But here’s the weird part: It actually doesn’t relate especially to the plot. It comes from a 1971 giallo that also stars Edwige Fenech — Blade of the Ripper (a.k.a. The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh³), in which she receives a threatening note that contains that message. The title ties in with the film in only a vaguely thematic way, even though it sounds like something that would  directly figure into the story, I Know What You Did Last Summer-style.

It is at times like this when I trip over myself trying to figure out how people decide to name anything anything.

Here’s the trailer for this movie, whatever you want to call it:

And the whole film is viewable in one post on YouTube, in case you’re interested.

Two brief notes and one long one:

1. If Google Translate knows its Greek.
2. I don’t know enough about German to tell if this is The Killer Who Is a Nymphomanic or the The Person Who Kills Nymphomaniacs.
3. But also a.k.a. Den djævelske kniv (The Demon Knife), Der Killer von Wien (The Killer of Vienna), Epikindynoi anthropoi (Dangerous People), Hartstochtelijke nachten van Mme Wardh (The Passionate Nights of Madame Wardh), Lâmina Assassina (Blade Killer), La perversa señora Ward (The Wicked Mrs. Ward), Les nuits folles de Mme Wardh (The Crazy Nights of Mrs. Wardh), Mannen med rakkniven (The Man With the Knife Missed Razor), O amartolos kyklos ton ekviaston (The Sinner Cycle of Extortion), Szerelmi vérszomj (Love Bloodlust), Uma Faca na Escuridão (A Knife in the Dark), and as it was simply known in the U.K., Next!

“Sorry, Sarah — I Can Control Time Now”

That’s an actual line spoken in a movie that I now regret watching.

What’s the movie, you ask? Oh, it’s The Black Cat, also known as De Profundis, also known as Il gatto nero, also known as Demons 6, also known as Dead Eyes, also known as Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat, even though it couldn’t have less to do with the actual Poe short story. If you, upon learning that this film has so many different titles, suspect that it might suck mightily, you’d be right: It’s not a good film. I’ve watched it anyway. And while I have a bit to say about it — among other things, “Holy shit, what the fuck was that?” — I’m going to do a favor for everyone and just show you the best the movie has to offer in stills. Occasionally, this film stumbles into a pleasing composition, and that’s all mostly a result of ripping off Dario Argento, so at the very least you can’t say it’s not colorful to look at.

Trust me, it’s a lot better than actually watching the movie, even passively, and you’ll follow the plot about as closely as I did.

Continued awesomeness after the jump.

Wow, you really scrolled through all of those? You may share my perverse interest in terrible things!

The weird thing is that I can’t now even remember how I heard about this movie now. But somehow, I ended up reading about the actress Caroline Munro, the brunette actress who looks and dresses like Kristen Wiig doing an impression of Lisa Vanderpump and whose every scene in this movie looks not only out of place but actually spliced in from a Skinemax softcore. And I only expressed even a passing interest in this movie because I’d read that it functioned as some kind of unofficial sequel to Dario Argento’s Suspiria, one of my favorite movies. Netflix had it streaming, and I said “What the hell? I don’t feel like hearing myself think tonight.”

It’s not an unofficial sequel to Suspiria. It actually mentions Suspiria by name and features chunks of its soundtrack. Instead, De Profundis or whatever you want to call it centers around the production a film that would theoretically complete the trilogy that Argento began with Suspiria, continued with Inferno and then left idle until 2007. This movie hit theaters back in 1989, believe it or not. Would you have guessed this by the overall look of it? No, of course you wouldn’t have. I guess this proves that Italy didn’t yet have the late ‘80s in 1989 and so it instead rocked that fuzzy, late 70s-early 80s vibe. The especially strange part about De Profundis is that it doesn’t even complete the trilogy. In the source material that inspired Argento to make the trilogy in the first place, Thomas de Quincey wrote about the Three Mothers — Mater Suspiriorum, the “mother of sighs” who serves as the big bad in Suspiria; Mater Tenebrarum, the “mother of darkness” and the big bad in Inferno; and Mater Lachrymarum, the “mother of tears” and the big bad in long-delayed final part, The Third Mother. This movie, however, concerned a different entity that de Quincey mentioned in the same essay. But whatever. That hardly seems like a flaw in a movie that so bravely struggles against coherence.

So what was this movie actually about? I don’t know. A witch or something? Who was Sarah supposed to be, again?