It has been awhile since I’ve written about Italian legend, Mario Bava. I have no idea why, but every so often images from his films dance through my mind and spin off into the ether. That’s the way phantasms work, I suppose. And now I have the troubled, confusing, and intoxicating Lisa and the Devil (1974) to add to my collection of Bava ghostery.
The film opened in Cannes in 1973, then played overseas the following year. Lisa, a languid, lurid, fever dream, was a dud. Producer Alfredo Leone and Bava’s burgeoning filmmaker son Lamberto shot and added exorcism footage of Lisa (all the rage at the time) while removing some of Papa Bava’s original film. Re-released in 1975 as The House of Exorcism, it too was dud. And bad.
Whereas Lisa and the Devil is not bad. In fact, it is quite good, different, and unique; the original...
The film opened in Cannes in 1973, then played overseas the following year. Lisa, a languid, lurid, fever dream, was a dud. Producer Alfredo Leone and Bava’s burgeoning filmmaker son Lamberto shot and added exorcism footage of Lisa (all the rage at the time) while removing some of Papa Bava’s original film. Re-released in 1975 as The House of Exorcism, it too was dud. And bad.
Whereas Lisa and the Devil is not bad. In fact, it is quite good, different, and unique; the original...
- 10/30/2021
- by Scott Drebit
- DailyDead
Above: Us one sheet for Black Sunday (Mario Bava, Italy, 1960).Earlier this week I featured Francine Spiegel and Dylan Haley’s terrific new poster for the re-release of Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby...Kill!, which has been playing at New York’s Quad Cinema in a 50th anniversary, 2K restoration. (Full disclosure: this week I started working for the film’s distributor, Kino Lorber, although I can take no credit for that design.) Today, the Quad follows up that run with Mondo Bava: 20-film retrospective of Bava’s films with many of the films on 35mm.Though Bava made over 30 films in various genres over the course of more than two decades, he is best known as perhaps the greatest stylist in horror, the maestro of the macabre. The posters for his horror films may not always convey Bava’s sense of style (notable exceptions being the French posters...
- 7/14/2017
- MUBI
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