Night Visitor


Night Visitor is an independently-financed 1989 thriller shot under the title Never Cry Devil that was directed by Rupert Hitzig, produced by Alain Silver, and stars Richard Roundtree, Elliott Gould, Allen Garfield, and Derek Rydall.

Synopsis

High school student Billy Colton is spying on his attractive new neighbor when he witnesses her being murdered by a man in a robe, and he recognizes the man as his unpopular history teacher Zachary Willard. Because he has a history of pranks and conflict with Willard, the police do not believe him. Threatened by Willard and his deranged brother Stanley, who are cultists and serial murderers, Billy convinces retired investigator Ronald 'Ron' Devereaux to help him find hard evidence.

Cast

The movie was briefly released by MGM/UA on 200 screens and garnered mixed reviews, many of which expressed humorous appreciation for a basement confrontation between Gould's Devereaux and Pollard's Stanley, while others disparaged the sequence as "a badly choreographed fight between a chainsaw wielding Pollard and a shotgun toting Gould that probably read really well in the script, but looks terrible on film." A later reviewer was more favorably disposed: "Combine Rear Window with late 80s Satanic conspiracy theories and this is the result. Not as bad as it sounds, Night Visitor is an unfairly obscure movie about Satanism in suburbia."