The Visitor AKA Stridulum (1979)
Take random bits and pieces of Star Wars, The Exorcist, The Birds, Carrie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Omen. Add a little religious allegory and a soupçon of LSD. Toss in a blender and hit liquify. Voilà! You've just created The Visitor; or, if you prefer, the original title, which seems to be Latin for "hissing." (Suspiria was already taken, but Tenebrae was still available at the time.)
On a Dune-like desert planet with a huge orange sun, John Huston in a robe faces a figure who is completely hidden in a similar robe. Huge roiling clouds appear, and fake snow falls everywhere. The hidden figure is revealed to be a little girl with a monster face.
Cut to a guy with long blonde hair and facial hair, who is wearing a white robe. The credits on IMDB just out-and-out call this character Jesus Christ, if you didn't make the connection. He's talking to a bunch of bald children in a white room. He supplies the viewer with our back story. It seems that an evil mutant with a name that sure sounds a lot like Satan was defeated by John Huston, whose character has a name that sure sounds like Yahweh. There's also some stuff about how sounds-like-Yahweh used birds against sounds-like-Satan, but the bad guy turned some of the birds to the dark side. Enter Huston himself, who announces that the latest spawn or incarnation of sounds-like-Satan is on Earth, in the form of (you guessed it) a little girl.
Cut to a basketball game in Atlanta, Georgia. Evil little girl demonstrates her powers by making a basketball hoop explode. Long story short, owner of the basketball team is being used by a cabal of business executive types to romance and eventually impregnate the girl's mother, so another evil child will be born.
The movie has barely started, so let me just hit some of the highlights. A beautiful toy bird somehow transforms into a handgun when the girl receives it as a birthday present. She throws it at her mother, which somehow causes it to go off. Mom is confined to a wheelchair. Later, the girl will torment her mother in other ways. Besides suffering all this, Mom still resists the advances of the basketball guy, so the cabal somehow impregnates her while she's unconscious. She gets an abortion from an understanding doctor.
Meanwhile, Huston shows up with his gang of bald guys in track suits who do yoga movements behind white screens on the top of a building. He also engages in casual chat with the girl while they play Pong, both of them knowing who the other is. Girl does random evil stuff. The scene where she grabs two guys by her hands while ice skating and spins around so fast that they go flying and crashing into windows is worth the price of admission.
After not doing too much to stop all this, Huston finally calls down a bunch of glowing lights that spin around for a while, then turn into a roiling gray cloud, then turn into an army of birds. They're real birds, except for one mechanical one that kills basketball guy by producing a steel rod from its head and stabbing him with it. The real birds also apparently kill the girl, who is now in full monster face form, but we cut back to the white room from the beginning, and she's there (and bald.) Huston explains that they don't kill children, but just remove the evil (and apparently shave their heads and transport them to this place.)
Believe me, I've barely scratched the surface of the weirdness of this thing. There are a lot of familiar actors besides Huston. Glenn Ford as the detective investigating the toy-bird-changed-into-handgun case. Shelley Winters as a housekeeper who sings "Shor'tnin' Bread" and knows the girl is evil, so slaps her around. The film is often visually impressive, despite how goofy it gets. The music is often bombastic, and the theme sounds like a disco version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra."
Truly a unique experience.
