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.
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Night Visitor/Never Cry Devil/The Night Visitor | |
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Directed by | Rupert Hitzig |
Written by | Randal Viscovich |
Produced by | Alain Silver |
Starring | Richard Roundtree Elliott Gould Shannon Tweed Michael J. Pollard Derek Rydall Allen Garfield |
Cinematography | Peter C. Jensen |
Edited by | Glenn Erickson |
Music by | Parmer Fuller |
Production company | Premiere Pictures Corporation |
Distributed by | United Artists Pictures MGM/UA Home Entertainment Premiere Pictures Corporation |
Release date |
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Running time | 93 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
High school student Billy Colton (Derek Rydall) is spying on his attractive new neighbor (Shannon Tweed) when he witnesses her being murdered by a man in a robe, and he recognizes the man as his unpopular history teacher Zachary Willard (Allen Garfield). 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 (Michael J. Pollard), who are cultists and serial murderers, Billy convinces retired investigator Ronald 'Ron' Devereaux (Elliott Gould) to help him find hard evidence.
The movie was briefly released by MGM/UA on 200 screens (none of which were in New York or Los Angeles) 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."[1] 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."[2]