Lisa and the Devil

Very Good DVD of Euro Horror Classic
The new Double-DVD of Mario Bava's great LISA AND THE DEVIL and it's re-edited abomination version HOUSE OF EXORCISM is a must for euro-horror fans. Bava's original version of LISA is one of the best lyrical euro-horror films ever. The presentation here looks just like the old ELITE laserdisc which also suffered from some slight digital artifacting...nothing awful, but it isn't perfect. Everything about this move is great- the music, the style, just the general feel of it...it's also completely unconventional. Of course, than there's the re-edited HOUSE OF EXORCISM version which added new "exorcist" type scenes and rearranged the film to make it accessible to audiences in the mid-70's. It's bad, of course, but it's great to have both versions together to see exactly how the film was damaged by the re-edit....this DVD in a way is the euro-trash fan's version of the Criterion "Brazil" DVD! As far as extras go, the DVD unfortunately does not have 2...

Mario Bava's Lisa And The Devil/ Leone's House Of Exorcism
In the liner notes of Lisa And The Devil/The House Of Exorcism Alfredo Leone ask Mario Bava that if Mario had carte blanche (a blank check), what movie would he make? His answer was this movie, Lisa And The Devil, which is Bava's most personal film.

Lisa (Elke Sommer) is a foreigner in a tourist group (it's never explained what country she's from, or what country they're visiting). While admiring a fresco of the devil (which looks amazingly like Telly Savalas), she hears music and is drawn to it, abandoning the tourist group in the process. This leads her to a man(Telly Savalas) carrying a life-sized dummy. Lisa recognizes him as the devil from the painting and from this moment on the viewer is taken for a nightmarish journey that's hard to tell which is actually real or a hallucination. Not that the end result is a mess, far from it; it is remarkable how Bava holds such a non-linear plot together so well where other filmakers before and since failed and it's easy to see why this is...

yet another testimony to the genius of Mario Bava
Mario Bava was one of the great filmmakers of his time. Revered and often imitated by illustrious contemporaries like Fellini and Visconti, his work has had long echoing reverberations through the films of David Lynch, Quentin Tarentino, and the entire body of hopelessly unimaginative slasher films that tried, and failed, to copy Bava's films. Yet he was largely dismissed and/or despised in his time. Lisa and the Devil is possibly his most brilliant, and easily his most personal film. It's also a sad example of the way this innovator was treated in his time. More a cinematic poem than traditional "movie", this is a surreal, stream of consciousness fantasy about a girl (Elke Sommer, who was never better) who may or may not be dead and a butler (Telly Savalas, sucking a lollipop) who may or may not be the devil. Lisa and the Devil is beautifully photographed in vibrant colour, violent, disturbing, and completely brilliant. Inventive sequences abound, encompassing...

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