It was one of those rare instances last night where I couldn't make it all the way through a film. The Visitor (1979) was the recipient of this rare honour.
Normally even if a film is tedious (The Sentinel 1977) or vile and soul violating (Salò 1975) I will sit through the thing to the end but this star studded film was so wantonly random I just had to switch off about half an hour in.
I started beautifully with a scene which could have been lifted from Jodorowsky's unmade Dune film. With a Jedi robed John Huston staring off into the horizon of an alien desert as a dark Sith robed figure emerges like a mirage from the horizon. If you have to steal there is very little crime in pinching from a great film like Lawrence of Arabia. But here's the rub the film continues to steal from one great film after another.
The Exorcist is the main victim, indeed it feels at times like a selection of deleted scenes from Exorcist II : The Heretic.
The Omen is also fleeced.
The plot is essentially the Scientology origin mythos. God is the alien captain of a prison ship carrying another alien Sateen which crashes to Earth in the distant past allowing him to escape. God creates birds to find the alien but Sateen turns into an eagle and destroys all but two of the birds and then mates with earth women passing his evil genes down the generations. Jesus (Franco Nero)... yep... Jesus... no REALLY!
with the help of John Huston and lots of bald people are trying to stop his latest vessel (a foul mouthed eight year old girl with the ability to make basketballs explode) from rising to the height of her powers. A shadowy cabal of the kind David Icke wanks himself silly thinking about...possibly, led by a blank faced Mel Ferrer have Lance Henriksen in their thrall with an aim to create a brother for the little brat which they hope to control.
It has a Poseidon Adventure style cast of Hollywood Greats who must have been either really hard up or blackmailed to being in crap like this.
It's like the above mention cabal had looked at what was a hit at the time (Devil child movies, science fiction, the Harlem Globe Trotters, cults) and just churned it all up in a liquidiser and poured it over the celluloid.
The soundtrack needs a mention too. There is this piece of music which is almost identical to the jingle announcing the last chance to buy ice-cream or hotdogs in UK 1970's cinemas and it is played at the most random times imaginable. I have no idea if this film gets any better, I held out to just after Glenn Ford bits the big one but the first half hours is utter balls.