a review of 不速之客

I just watched this one a second time to get a better handle on the randomness (I have a feeling that the two-days-later rewatch will become part of my standard strategy for Strange Club...) but still I find myself undecided about this movie. Its lineage is clearly that of a certain vein of schlocky 60s/70s sci-fi/horror, but it also seems to have higher aspirations, reaching towards the same midnight-movie nirvana as Ken Russell orJodorowsky. The first scene in particular seems to promise a completely different kind of movie than the one it turns into at times, but all the same it keeps dipping back into acidhead surreality ("IiIiIi'M a pReT-tY bUrRrRrD...") and it never quite stops feeling uniquely and memorably weird. It's hard to reconcile the film's amazingly careless disregard for realism (e.g. the utterly unbelievable car crash + explosion scene. I hope Glenn Ford was paid well for his time.) with the clear evidence of there being semi-serious authorial intent (the juxtaposed cuts between Katy's gymnastics practice and Barbara's physical therapy), which makes it hard to tell whether the film is a deliriously good kind of bad, or just sort of kitschily bad. As mentioned above, the score really adds to this mismatched feeling, lurching from moods like "kung-fu blaxploitation" to "NFL highlights reel" to "3M industrial training film" to "Richard Strauss goes disco", sometimes all within the same sequence. The music itself is inexplicable, and its usage in the film even more so. I will admit to being disturbed by young Paige Conner's performance as Katy; Although I didn't believe in her for one second as a authentic psychic spawn of Satan, I could believe that she was a real-life terror of a child star. That kind of dead-eyed sociopathy in such a young kid can't be faked, can it? The scene 2/3 of the way through the movie where she jumps out from behind Barbara with the phone ("IT'S FOR YOU MOMMY!") and starts nuzzling and kissing her face while begging Lance Henriksen to give her a baby brother, that was where I went from just being annoyed by her precociousness to being genuinely unsettled. Other notes: According to the IMDB listing, the Franco Nero character at the beginning and end is supposed to be Jesus Christ. Is this just IMDB contributors putting us on, or was that literally the filmmakers' intention? IMDB also includes a credit for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, presumably in the basketball scene, but I didn't spot him anywhere. The player who shares some meaningful glares with Katy (say, what was that about?) before she sabotages his winning dunk is named "Abdul" but it's definitely not Kareem. Again, I suspect that IMDB is trolling us here. In addition, I also refuse to believe that "Ovidio Assonitis" is the name of a real writer/producer, and not an imaginary colorectal disorder.