Der Teuflische

Okay, so I saw 'House Of Exorcism' the re-edited version of Mario Bava's 'Lisa And The Devil' with the added cash in footage. I've heard great things about the original version, but I haven't yet had an opportunity to view it so I'm sticking with this, the "unauthorized" cut. Bava must have had mixed feelings about it seeing as his name has been removed as director. I can understand why, because I'm a little ambivalent about it myself. This is in many ways a confusing mess of a movie, but overall enjoyable enough and holds the interest until the end. Elke Sommer, who had previously worked with Bava on the uneven 'Baron Blood', plays an American tourist apparently possessed by the Devil. While being exorcised by a priest (Robert Alda), we cut to a series of events involving her being picked up hitch hiking and taken to a mysterious mansion populated by various nuts, not least of which is Leandro, the mysterious lollipop sucking butler (yep, you guessed it, Telly Savalas). This footage (recycled from the original 'Lisa And The Devil') is either hallucination or flashbacks or both, and Leandro may or may not be the Devil. It's all very hard to tell. Frankly, you won't even care. Even so, I enjoyed this movie even if it was incoherent most of the time. It may not be genuine Bava but it's a lot of fun, and I must admit I preferred it to 'Baron Blood'. Take from that what you will.

The House of Exorcism (1973) is an interesting patch work film. After the disappointing attendance figures for LISA AND THE DEVIL, Producer Alfredo Leone re-shot and incorporated new footage into LISA AND THE DEVIL making the movie into an Exorcist knockoff. The ploy worked and Leone made his money back plus a profit. HOUSE OF EXORCISM is about a Bavarian woman named Lisa who's possessed by a restless spirit. The things that the spirit does and says puts Pazul/Linda Blair to shame.

The spirit has a very foul mouth and uses creative dialog to motivate the priest into helping her. The movie is nowhere near the classic as LISA AND THE DEVIL but it's quite entertaining. However, the two movies are very different and they don't match together very well. One of the better Exorcist wannabes.

Highly recommended for camp value.

THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM is what happened when the original, truly surreal horror film from Director Mario Bava, LISA AND THE DEVIL failed to turn a big profit. It was reworked, with extra scenes added / insinuated into the film. These scenes, starring Robert Alda as Father Michael, are about Lisa's (Elke Sommer) being possessed by a demon.

Of course, this had nothing whatsoever to do with the original movie, so new scenes of Lisa spouting obscenities, going bug-eyed, foaming at the mouth, spewing the obligatory green stuff, and contorting her body are inter-cut with the genuine footage from Bava's classic. The result is... bizarre.

Fans of LATD will watch agog, as their beloved film is edited, annihilated, and continually interrupted by what amounts to an unintentional parody of THE EXORCIST. This was obviously due to the huge popularity of that movie in the early 1970's. It's sort of like what might have happened if someone had decided to turn Hitchcock's PSYCHO into a comedy about motel management!

THE BURNING QUESTION: How was Ms. Sommer lured into trashing her own film, and making such a spectacle of herself in the process?...

Lisa and the Devil was a film directed by Mario Bava, it had a limited cinema release in 1973 but was soon withdrawn by producer Alfredo Leone as he did not know how to market this strange, lyrical film. It sat on the shelf for a couple of years with no distributer interested in picking it up, so Leone decided to attempt to make some money back on his investment. Two years later he returned with one of the participants from the first film, Elke Sommer - along with Robert Alda and Carmen Silva, neither of whom appeared in Lisa and the Devil at all - and, with Bava's assistance, directed a batch of new, completely unrelated material. He then merged these new scenes in with parts from the original film. The resultant movie became known as The House of Exorcism. Like some other Italian films from the time like L'anticristo it clearly was designed to cash in on the success of The Exorcist, as it is basically a rip off of this film in many ways. Lisa and the Devil, on the other hand, had nothing to do with demonic possession and its story is completely unrelated.

The biggest single problem with The House of Exorcism is that if you are already familiar with Lisa and the Devil it's very difficult disassociating the scenes from that movie from their original intent. It simply just makes you want to see them again in their original context. When I watch The House of Exorcism, it's the new bits that interest me; the stuff from Lisa is just simply distracting. The contrast in tone between the two sections of film is massive, where the stuff from Lisa is beautiful and fairly subtle; House of Exorcism is relentlessly coarse and goes for shock value. It's pretty much an exploitation movie and the sequences from Lisa and the Devil do not fit into its tone and story-line well at all. In fairness, it may work a lot better - maybe even quite well - if you have never seen the original film but I suspect most people going into this already have and that's essentially the problem.

The new material is set mainly in a hospital where Lisa (Elke Sommer) is confined after being possessed by the Devil. A priest (Robert Alda) tries to exorcise her. The new scenes are typified by Sommer barking out obscenities at Alda. There's lots of green vomit, a vision of a beautiful naked woman and...frogs. The new stuff's not that bad really and would have no doubt have made an entertaining schlockfest if it had constituted the full movie. But, as it is, the majority of the run-time is made up of re-used material from Lisa and the Devil, which is distracting and useless if you have seen the original already. Nowadays, with the original film readily available, The House of Exorcism has become no more than a curiosity piece. Fun to watch for the added possession material but as a whole it doesn't work anymore.

If you listen to Alfredo Leone's commentary on House of Exorcism, you'll understand, if not approve, of what Leone did to salvage his investment. His re-edit and added footage accomplished his goal. He avoided taking a huge loss on Lisa and The Devil. Business before art.

Bava of course did not approve of his master work being mutilated and that ultimately led to a split in their business relationship. Leone states in his commentary that his respect for Bava remained. According to Leone, Bava did not care for nudity and swearing and would not stay on the set when those new scenes were shot with Elke and Carmen Silva as the naked temptress incarnation of Elke. I always found this interesting about Bava. He would film the most horrendous violence and gore in perverse scenarios (mainly directed at women like most filmmakers) but balked at cursing and exposed female flesh.

The takeaway from this is that Lisa and The Devil was produced and exists independently and the commercial salvage job called House of Exorcism made money.