The Visitor (1979)

          There are so many mind-meltingly weird elements in the sci-fi/horror epic The Visitor that it’s difficult to do the film justice with a brief description. Put simply, the movie is a vague rip-off of The Omen, concerning the efforts of a heroic character to prevent a malevolent child from unleashing something terrible. Accordingly, The Visitor has the requisite scenes of a wholesome-looking young girl using her supernatural powers—or simply her bare hands—to inflict violence. And while the true strangeness of The Visitor stems from the chaotic storytelling, maniacal style, and WTF plot complications, even the central premise gets tarted up in a way that ensures audience bewilderment.

          Because, you see, it’s not just that little Katy Collins (Paige Conner) is some sort of devil child who must be killed in order to protect the universe. No, the problem is that Katy’s innocent mother, pretty Atlanta divorcée Barbara Collins (Joanne Nail), has a womb that breeds superkids, so conspirators led by mysterious surgeon Dr. Walker (Mel Ferrer) have positioned Barbara’s boyfriend, Raymond (Lance Henriksen), to push Barbara into marriage and a second pregnancy so she can breed a son, because together with Katy, the son will comprise the demonic equivalent of the Wonder Twins. Got all that? Good, since there’s more!

          Stalking Barbara and Katy is grandfatherly space alien Jerzy Colsowicz (John Huston), who leads a band of bald alien musclemen who spend most of their time doing the equivalent of interpretive dance while standing behind scrims atop an Atlanta rooftop. Interstellar performance-art alert! Jerzy chases Barbara and Katy around downtown Atlanta, even though Katy tries to use her telekinetic abilities to kill him, and Jerzy spends one evening in the Collins home by announcing he’s the babysitter sent by an employment agency because the regular girl is sick. After all, don’t most of us welcome 70-year-old men into our homes to watch over our prepubescent daughters while we’re away? Oh, and we still haven’t mentioned the never-seen aunt who gives Katy a loaded pistol for her birthday, or that Katy accidentally shoots and paralyzes her mother. And then there’s crazed nanny Jane (Shelley Winters), who slaps Katy around because she knows that Katy is evil. Is it even worth noting that the plot also includes an intrepid police detective (Glenn Ford) and a silent longhair who may or may not be Jesus (Franco Nero)?

          The Visitor is gonzo right from the opening scene, a trippy special-effects vignette showing Huston in some otherworldly environment with oddly colored liquid skies. Among the film’s myriad bizarre episodes are the following: Katy uses her telekinesis to sway an NBA game by causing a basketball to explode; Jerzy has some sort of orgasmic interaction with a radioactive space cloud full of birds; a scene of spinal surgery gets intercut with a gymnastics routine; and famed movie director Sam Peckinpah shows up for one scene, in silhouette, to play a medical doctor. Accentuating all of this bizarre content is disjointed editing that makes everything seem hallucinatory, and lots of operatic disco music. You’ve been warned.

The Visitor: FREAKY

Switchblade Sisters (1975)

           A cartoonish exploitation movie rescued from obscurity by grindhouse godhead Quentin Tarantino—who re-released the picture theatrically and on home video through his short-lived Rolling Thunder Pictures imprint—Switchblade Sisters is a distaff precursor to Walter Hill’s infinitely superior gang-warfare thriller The Warriors (1979). Like the latter film, Switchblade Sisters features action and characterization that wouldn’t be out of place in a comic book, even though the lurid storyline’s tropes of rape and sexual politics are strictly for grown-ups. Directed by ’70s staple Jack Hill, who made most of Pam Grier’s best vehicles, Switchblade Sisters has been exhibited under many titles, including The Jezebels and Maggie’s Stiletto Sisters. As the various monikers imply, the story revolves around an all-girl street gang. Led by tiny but vicious Lace (Robbie Lee), the Dagger Debs get caught in a turf war with a rival male gang at the same time a new member, Maggie (Joanne Nail), discovers misdeeds by Lace and slowly usurps Lace’s role as leader. By the end of the story, the Dagger Debs have become the Jezebels, a hardcore outfit with a fierce reputation and a violent track record.
          The movie is filled with fights, prison scenes, and undercover missions, so nearly every cliché of female-centric action cinema is represented. Bull-dyke prison boss? Check. Climactic catfight? Check. Babes using their wiles to outsmart men? Check. None could accuse the makers of Switchblade Sisters of shortchanging the audience in terms of silly violence, especially since the ending features a full-fledged street war involving armored vehicles, machine guns, and—just for good measure—an all-black gang comprising nothing but militant females. There’s even room in the flick for a Dagger Deb named Patch who has—you guessed it!—an eye patch. The acting in Switchblade Sisters is generally awful, though leading lady Nail has a certain sexy swagger, but the dialogue is so cheesy it’s not as if highly developed dramatic skills were required. Similarly, while the story is highly predictable, Hill delivers the goods so abundantly that the picture never fails to generate something resembling excitement. And because Hill goes much lighter on nudity than usual, it’s easier to except the quasi-feminist posturing of Switchblade Sisters than it is to accept similar rhetoric in Hill’s other drive-in flicks.

Switchblade Sisters: FUNKY

The Gumball Rally (1976)

          In 1975, a Time magazine cover story introduced the world to the “Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash,” better known as the Cannonball Run, an illegal road race in which competitors sped across the U.S. to determine who could travel from New York to Los Angeles the fastest. Created by a pair of car enthusiasts rebelling against speed limits, the Cannonball Run inspired two low-budget movies released in 1976. First up was the Roger Corman production Cannonball, a black comedy with the accent on violence, and then came this lighthearted take on the subject.

          The Gumball Rally stars Michael Sarrazin as Michael Bannon, the idle-rich originator of a Cannonball-style road race involving a handful of free-spirited competitors. Although the movie has some perfunctory plot devices, like Bannon’s friendly rivalry with fellow racer Steve Smith (Tim McIntire) and the efforts of inept cop Lt. Roscoe (Norman Burton) to interrupt the race, the focus is on wild automotive antics: The drivers pull high-speed shenanigans like transferring passengers from one moving car to another, and they make sport of outsmarting cops across the country.

          There’s not much in the way of characterization, so, for instance, Alice (Susan Flannery) and Jane (Joanne Nail) are one-note hotties using their looks to wriggle free of police entanglements while demolishing speed limits in their Porsche. Despite its superficiality, The Gumball Rally is an amiable celebration of individualism and irreverence, since the racers aren’t out to hurt anybody; they’re simply competing for fun, glory, and a gold-plated gumball machine.

          As directed by Charles Bail, whose career primarily comprises episodes of shows like CHiPs and Knight Rider, The Gumball Rally benefits greatly from enthusiastic performers. Sarrazin, an promising ’60s/’70s leading man whose career was starting to wobble at this point, is charming and funny, while McIntire offers his customary force-of-nature bluster; they make such a great duo it would have been fun to see them in other movies together. Gary Busey plays another in his long line of crazy-redneck characters, hootin’ and hollerin’ to enjoyable effect, and a young Raul Julia steals the movie with his flamboyant turn as an Italian speedster with a weakness for the ladies.

          The Gumball Rally is fluff, but it goes down a lot smoother than the officially sanctioned movie about the Cannonball race, 1981’s star-studded The Cannonball Run. Whereas the latter film is bloated, crude, and sexist, The Gumball Rally is 105 minutes of pleasant silliness.

The Gumball Rally: GROOVY