The Visitor Gets A New Trailer And Release Dates
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The proprietor of forgotten genre movies and emerging foreign films, Drafthouse Films will be re-releasing a cult science fiction classic from 1979 called The Visitor. The boutique label has a penchant for strange oddities that would otherwise be relegated to your local video store (or just lost altogether), but because of Drafthouse Films, you can watch these eccentric movies at a theater near you or on Netflix Streaming. The sci-fi film The Visitor is a different beast that has to be experienced.
Drafthouse Films has released the trailer for The Visitor re-release, which was recently restored and will now be presented uncut for American audiences. The Visitor will be released in theaters across the United States for the first time ever, which is reason enough to check it out.
The Visitor is an Italian sci-fi film about a young girl with telekinetic powers. Katy Collins is an eight-year-old, Christ-like alien girl who has a special power that has to be carried on for future generations. Her mother Barbara has to give birth to a male with the same powers as Katy so she can one day mate with him to keep the telekinetic power bloodline going. That’s right, Katy has to mate with her future brother to save humanity. The film gets stranger when “The Visitor” and his legion of telekinetic children arrive to help Katy’s telekinetic powers stay on the side of good.
The Visitor was dubbed a “knockoff blockbuster movie,” which drew comparisons to more popular sci-fi and horror movies such as The Omen, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and Star Wars. Italian filmmaker Giulio Paradisi (aka Michael J. Paradise) directed the film, while Ovidio G. Assonitis produced.
While the film seems like schlocky genre film, it actually features an all-star cast of notable character actors and directors from the ’70s, including John Huston, Shelley Winters, Glenn Ford, Lance Henriksen, Mel Ferrer, Joanne Nail, Franco Nero, and Paige Conner as Katy, with legendary film director Sam Peckinpah making a cameo appearance.
Drafthouse Films has also released new images from The Visitor that are completely mind-bending and eerie, as well as a new poster for the sci-fi film. When compared to the film’s original poster, you can plainly see that Drafthouse Films and Seek And Speak (the one-sheet designers) came up with something more fitting to the movie. When The Visitor was released on VHS in the early ’80s, viewers were likely upset to discover that the movie’s premise didn’t match up with the video box art.
The new poster:
The old poster:
The Visitor opens tonight, October 31, in a limited release, and will get a wider in Alamo Drafthouse theaters and other indie/art-house repository theaters across the country in the following weeks. The Visitor will also be released on home video and digitally in January 2014.
Drafthouse Film is also making three tracks from The Visitor’s soundtrack available for download for FREE on their website.
