#mcvicker

Definitely not to be confused with the 1971 Swedish film starring Max Von Sydow and Liv Ulman, 1989's NIGHT VISITOR is a bizarre horror-comedy that's half-pilfered from FRIGHT NIGHT, and the other half is just...something that is not under control. A hunky teen with a "boy who cried wolf" problem witnesses a horrific murder while spying on his neighbor Shannon Tweed, and then he and his goofy friend and their "cool" gal pal endeavor to out their mean teacher as a devil worshiper. The appearance of Mme Tweed and a variety of streetwalkers from central casting seem to suggest that this is going to be really sexy, but it is not, unless you get off super hard to women tossing their hair and winking at the camera. And on that note, I must point out that the teen's mom, played by Brooke Bundy, looks so much like the neighbor he's obsessed with, that like...well if I had a friend in high school who was sexually fixated on someone who looked just like his own mother, I would never, ever let him live it down. I would be calling that poor jerk on Christmas to remind him of it every year for the rest of his life.

The circulation of the above exciting image suggests a much gnarlier horror movie than what this actually is, part of which is partly a domestic comedy between Allen Garfield as the teacher and his live-in uh companion Michael J. Pollard, who plays a deranged moron as per usual. Hardboiled cop Richard Roundtree is along for the ride for some reason; at the end he asks the kid where he got his shotgun, and upon hearing that it was his father's, Roundtree goes, "One-man vigilante, huh?", which makes no sense whatsoever. Elliot Gould plays the grizzled detective who the plucky teens convince to come out of retirement to help them, and like, they go to his house which is pretty decent-looking except there's a couple of loose shirts out that he performatively removes from a chair so they can sit down, which seems like is supposed to indicate that his life is a wreck--but if you come to my house unannounced at some random hour, I can pretty much promise that there will be a couple of loose shirts out. There are plenty of legitimate signs that I'm deteriorating into reclusivity, but I don't think that's a very good one.

Anyway I really want to spoil the end of the movie, which might help if you're short on time: After all the drama is resolved, the teen takes his friend-turned-girlfriend on an extremely long date. There is no dialog, because this was obviously never in any version of a script, and drives her around to various fun couplesy activities that you might see in a chewing gum commercial, and then finally they kiss in an astonishingly long freeze-frame. This is sort of fascinating because the movie is over an hour and a half long and it doesn't seem like they should have been so desperate for extra minutes, but you're going to get them anyway! The End.

PS My favorite part of the movie is when the satanic teacher sits on a stink bomb, or something, and all this yellow smoke comes billowing out of his ass and he starts screaming at the mischievous teen "YOU ARE TERMINATED! YOU ARE TERMINATED!", which is such a funny and meaningless thing for a teacher to yell at a student, I would never recover if this happened in my class. All I could think of is: