The Visitor
Director: Giulio Paradisi
Cast: John Huston, Mel Ferrer, Glenn Ford, Lance Henriksen, Franco Nero, Sam Peckinpah, Joanne Nail, Paige Conner
Drafthouse Films
Rated R | 101 Minutes
Release Date: November 22, 2013

Directed by Giulio Paradisi, 1979’s The Visitor stars legendary Hollywood director/actor John Huston (The Maltese Falcon; Treasure Of The Sierra Madre) as an intergalactic warrior who joins a cosmic Christ figure (Franco Nero) in battle against a demonic 8-year-old girl and her pet hawk.

Restored and presented uncut for the first time ever in the U.S. by Drafthouse Films, The Visitor is a ’70s psychedelic mindwarp complete with vicious bird attacks, multi-dimensional warfare and pre-adolescent profanity. Somewhere between Hell, the darkest reaches of the universe, and Atlanta, GA, the fate of the cosmos hangs in the balance.

The Visitor fuses elements of The Omen, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, The Birds, Rosemary’s Baby, The Fury, and even Star Wars, creating the most ambitious, insane film you’ve ever seen. Basically, Space Jesus sends an emissary named Jerzy (Huston) to Earth to capture Katy (Paige Conner), a little girl with superhuman abilities. Meanwhile, evil space aliens are trying to get Katy’s mother (Joanne Nail) pregnant so that she will give birth to the antichrist, another super-kid they can use to destroy the human race.

I was born a poor white child in the waning winter days of 1979. Never was I able to step foot inside a grindhouse theater, and the only time I ever went to a drive-in theater that wasn’t doubling as a flea market was to see Fletch when I was barely old enough to remember going in the first place. VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and spending a lot of time at the houses of friends and relatives with access to pay cable movie channels helped fill me in on the deranged cinematic greatness I was too young to catch first run in its proper theatrical venue. Being born in the wrong place at the seriously wrong time was no excuse for me to not become a fervent admirer of the finest exploitation movies ever made.

B-movies, C-movies, Z-movies, I’ve seen a lot. If I lived a few extra lifetimes after my first ran out I could never be able to see all of the movies I ever wanted to see. My DVD and Blu-ray collection isn’t massive (getting there though) and yet there are still a few titles I have yet to sit down and watch. Sue me, I stay pretty busy most of the time. Once upon a time there were theaters from the largest metropolises to the smallest one-horse burgs that specialized in playing the kinds of offbeat, occasionally undefinable, made-for-a-quick-buck flicks that were too gonzo to show its grimy celluloid visage in mainstream cinemas that primarily attracted bored suburbanites and their spoiled, hateful children. You could see a lot of these schlocky gems in double or triple feature bills or “dusk ’till dawn” marathons that cost substantially less for a ticket than a IMAX 3D screening, even with inflation taken into account. You definitely got your money’s worth, that could not be denied.

It’s always exciting for fans of western movie genre to see a new movie like Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained being buzzed about, primarily because we just don’t see new western films nearly as often as we would all like to.

Westerns were everywhere back in the day, even sprouting sub-genres like the spaghetti western. The best known spaghetti western was and is Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name trilogy, of course, which starred Clint Eastwood. But there’s many other great spaghetti westerns to enjoy, one of which being the 1966 film Django.

The movie starred Franco Nero, who has a cameo in Django Unchained, and it appears we may not have seen the last of Nero as the iconic character.

Back in early March rumors began to swirl that Quentin Tarantino‘s next movie would be a spaghetti western — glorious news for any fan of the director’s work familiar with his many influences. The word was that his Inglourious Basterds star Christoph Waltz would be starring, and that the cast might also feature the likes of star Franco Nero, Keith Carradine, and Treat Williams.

Now a picture has been sent out via Twitter of what looks like the first page of Tarantino’s script, apparently confirming that the title of the new movie will be Django Unchained. This was later confirmed by IndieWire who contacted Tarantino’s agency about the image.

It’s no secret that director Quentin Tarantino has been heavily influenced by both kung-fu movies and spaghetti westerns of the ’60s and ’70s. We saw him dive into the kung-fu with Kill Bill and he already delivered on the movie fans have been begging him for for years, Inglourious Basterds, so the absolute perfect next project for him would be a western, naturally.

Django and Die Hard 2 star Franco Nero was talking recently and happened to mention that he was doing a new spaghetti western with Tarantino that also involved Keith Carradine and Treat Williams. It was unclear at first whether this was true or not, or what was actually entailed in the possible project. This led AICN to do a little digging, and while all details are still a little uncertain they were able to come up with some very exciting information.

First of all, they confirmed that Tarantino is putting together his next movie and it will indeed be a spaghetti western, which could be one of the greatest pieces of news ever for fans of the director and the western genre. Adding to that, their source says that Quentin already has one star locked up: his Basterds villain and Oscar winner Christoph Waltz.