A scene from The Visitor (Drafthouse Films)

Distributor Drafthouse Films is out to find the weird, the bizarre, the off-kilter (to say the least), and the slightly obscure –a logical progression for the Alamo Drafthouse’s Tim League, who for years has programmed his share of wild and impressive cult fare at Austin’s premier movie theater. So far the company has rereleased an Australian gem called Wake in Fright last year and will also put out Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, an exploitation-filled treat from early ’80’s NYC. Now they have unearthed a film that is astonishing in its weirdness and unbridled in its ability to shock, if not scare, featuring a cast of actors that is mind-boggling, hilarious, and almost kind of sad.

The plot, oh Jesus. Best as I could tell it’s about a young girl, Katie (Paige Conner), the daughter of a well-off Barbara Collins (Joanne Nail). How she’s exactly well off? I don’t know as we don’t see her work, but her boyfriend, played by Lance Henricksen, manages a basketball team. We only see this once early on with a game that ends in an explosion (?). He has been given a task by a brooding group of men in suits, led by Mel Ferrer, and they remind him what’s at stake with Barbara: her womb has the ability to produce children with great, shall we say, talents, most likely for evil, and they want one more, preferably a son. It’s his task to do it.

Meanwhile, John Huston plays a mysterious figure who looks and talks like John Huston. He comes to Atlanta with a group of bald men who are doing his will. He’s a “babysitter” watching over little Katie. (Shelley Winters, too, is a sort of babysitter/caretaker for Barbara.) It appears that the stage is set for a battle over Katie, Barbara’s womb, what evil might come forth, and what Katie can do with, um, her mind.

I’m still trying to rack my brain over what I’ve seen in The Visitor. It’s nominally a horror movie, perhaps in the vein of a Rosemary’s Baby (though oddly enough, those Satanic cult folk were much more competent about getting their Rosemary pregnant right away), and maybe a Stephen King thriller (the little girl with telekinetic powers, either that or she has a falcon or big bird in her house that she uses to kill when there’s someone, like Glenn Ford’s nosy detective, that she wants stamped out with lots of pecks).

It’s clearly a product of the Italian exploitation era, though it’s interesting to note that the director, Giuliano Paradiso (or, excuse me, Michael J. Paradise as he’s credited), made only a few other films, none seen really at all. Matter of fact, The Visitor’s original release was sort of squashed, and though I have little research to go on, it would seem it was originally an American International Production (Samuel Z. Arkoff’s company), and it got dumped and then was recut a couple years later.

This is some frigging weird stuff in how it’s edited and scored musically. Scenes of a wheelchair-bound Barbara wheeling about her house in despair are intercutted with shots of Katie performing gymnastics, and the music is just hysterical, and I don’t mean the funny kind of hysteria. The characters sometimes spout useful exposition—in Mel Ferrer’s scenes—and other times, they are more oblique, like in Sam Peckinpah’s (yes, the Wild Bunch’s “Bloody Sam” Peckinpah, playing a doctor who, according to IMDb trivia, is actually supposed to be Barbara’s ex-husband, which is not made clear by Peckinpah being dubbed over.)

Seeing Huston and Winters and Ford is strange enough. Near the end, Huston goes all wizard-magician-WTF on his rooftop summoning the stars and clouds to make, uh, huge birds to attack the villains, waving his arms around like the Mickey Mouse’s Sorcerer in Fantasia.

The Visitor is surely a cult find, made by people who just didn’t give a hoot except to make something subversive. It’s almost a shame that the female actors, Joanne Nail (who previously featured in Jack Hill’s Switchblade Sisters) and Paige Conner, didn’t do more with their screen careers. Then again, it took a film company like Drafthouse to even make me aware of the film in the first place. It will be a fine curio for exploitation for movie fanatics and Italian horror aficionados. For the general public… John Huston as a God-like wizard? Really?