The Movie:

In Mario Bava's 1974 film, Lisa And The Devil, the lovely Elke Sommer plays Lisa, a very pretty young woman who decides to vacation in Spain. After running into a truly strange painting of the devil housed in a building her tour group visits, she winds up getting separated from the vacationers she was traveling with and finds herself lost in an old city. As she wanders around the town, strange things start to happen to her and eventually she meets up with the butler of an old Spanish villa (Telly Savalas) who looks suspiciously like the devil she saw earlier in the painting.

A slow and dreamlike film, Lisa And The Devil proves to be a genuinely unsettling film that builds to a truly eerie conclusion. Rich with metaphors and strange imagery, the film toys around with the connections that may or may not exist between the spiritual world and the physical plain. For the first time in his career, Bava was given a clean slate to work with and producer Alfredo Leone basically let him shoot his dream project. The result is a very creative, beautifully shot and obviously quite personal project that is both horrifying, mesmerizing, and at times, more than just a little bit sad particularly when you consider how the film's commercial failure almost destroyed the director's will to work.

Those issues aside, the film is a true gem. Telly Savalas is strangely sinister in his role as the servant/prince of darkness and his odd discussions with the countless mannequins that litter the villa are both amusing and a fairly disturbing at the same time. Sommer plays her part with a great sense of innocence and naive charm, and she's pretty far removed here from the sex pot roles she's most often associated with. That's not to say she doesn't look great - she does - but she's given a chance with this film to prove that she's more than just a good looking woman, she's also quite a capable actress. Carlo Savina's melancholy soundtrack fits the subtle nightmarish atmosphere of the film perfectly works hand in hand with some fantastic camerawork ensuring that everything falls into place quite nicely.

Although the picture was shown once at Cannes, and to some critical acclaim at that, Lisa And The Devil ran into distribution problems and was ultimately put on the shelf for a few years. Alfredo Leone decided to add some newly shot footage to the picture and re-release a few years later as House Of Exorcism in hopes cashing in on the massive box office success of William Friedkin's The Exorcist. This time around, Lisa is literally possessed by the devil and an exorcist named Father Michael (Robert Aldo) is called in to save her soul - the result is a disaster when compared to the artistic and poignant original version but it proved to be a large commercial success and allowed Leone to recoup the money he'd invested in the original version of the movie.

By adding exploitative elements through new scenes (some shot by Mario Bava, some by his son Lamberto Bava and some by Alfredo Leone) the film reached a larger audience looking for more visceral thrills. Lisa vomits all over the place, just like Regan in Friedkin's film, and even upchucks frogs during one key scene! She spews venomous insults and thrashes around in bed using some rather amusing profanity while Aldo basically plays the part of Max Von Sydow's character. While this turned out to be quite a crowd pleaser, one has to wonder why. It's certainly entertaining in a trash film sort of way but by inserting the new footage and excising other scenes to keep the running time workable, much of the actual story is simply thrown out the window. Regardless, both cuts of the film have their place in Bava's filmography, for better or for worse, so it's certainly good that the two very different films have been preserved on home video even if it's obvious which one is an actual Mario Bava film and which one is a strange bastardization of a Mario Bava film.

Video:

Lisa And The Devil looks very good here in AVC encoded 1080p high definition framed at 1.78.1 widescreen. Colors are a little bit warmer than they were on the Anchor Bay DVD release from a few years back and are closer to the older Image disc. Detail is considerably improved over past DVD issues, as is texture and skin tones look nice and natural here. There are some scenes that are on the soft side but that appears to have been intentional. Close up shots show lots of nice facial detail and texture in clothing and set decoration, from the pilling on the curtains to the dirt on the mannequins. The House Of Exorcism cut is presented in the same aspect ratio using the same video codec and looks just as good, if not slightly more detailed in some scenes, than the original version. Both cuts offer significant upgrades from past standard definition releases - fans should be pretty pleased with Kino's efforts. Some small specks are evident here and there but there aren't any issues with heavy print damage nor are there any issues with noise reduction or edge enhancement.