Director: Mario Bava
Screenplay: Mario Bava and Alfred Leone
Starring: Elke Sommer, Telly Savalas, Sylva Koscina, Alessio Orano, Alida Valli
Running Time: 95 minutes
Genre: Horror, fantasy
Lisa Reiner (Sommer), an American tourist visiting Spain, sees a fresco in a church depicting a bald Devil hauling away human souls. Wandering away from the tour group she winds up in a little antique store where she encounters a man named Leandro (Savalas), who looks identical to the Devil in the fresco. Unable to find her way back to the tour group, Lisa finds herself at a palatial villa owned by a strange young man (Orano) and his mother, a blind countess (Valli) and where Leandro appears to work as a butler.
This is only the beginning of Lisa's descent into a surreal nightmare. This is a film with only the vaguest plot, and is kind of what you might come up with in a nightmare after reading too much Gothic horror stories and eating a lot of very strong cheese. Following the success of Baron Blood (1972), director Mario Bava was given a free hand to do whatever he wanted with this film. The movie features some striking images, and it really is a beautiful film, full of offbeat camera angles, and it works if you see it as working with a kind of dream logic. Elke Sommer walks through the film in a kind of sleepwalking daze, which actually works for the material. Telly Savalas has a lot of presence, and is often quite sardonically funny as the mysterious Devil, whose fondness for lollipops was carried over to Savalas' most famous role in the TV show Kojak (1973-1978). Following a disastrous premiere screening at the Cannes Film Market in 1973, the film was drastically re-edited and was further edited for its US release, with some additional exorcism scenes as well as additional nudity and gore, and was released under the title House of Exorcism, to cash in on the success of The Exorcist (1973).
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