How sad is this?

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

If you are of a certain age, you may remember Telly Savalas as the hugely popular, lollipop sucking detective from the 70s/80s series 'Kojak'. If you happen to be from the UK, you may also remember Elke Sommer from 1975's 'Carry On Behind' as the genuinely funny Anna Vrooshka. It is no spoiler to say they star as this film's title characters, for, five minutes in, Lisa sees the image of Savalas' Landro as 'the Devil' on a wall mural in Tuledo and keeps running into him, often as he is carrying a suspiciously lifelike mannequin. Suave and charming (he's even sucking a lollipop here too – a contractual clause?), he nonetheless exudes a palpable sense of threat.Lisa, and the audience, then meet a succession of suspicious characters. Not quite grotesques, but a menagerie of people flawed in one way or another, so that a collection of them helps to sustain the feelings of unease. One such character is the ostensibly fey Max (Alessio Orano), who expresses feelings for Lisa. All kinds of horrors are thrown at Lisa, and it seems for a time that Elke Sommers' is merely required to look as terrified as possible as the weird and the apparently dead line up to shock her.Savalas is excellent as Landro. Occasionally carrying scenes alone and talking to himself, a lesser actor would not be able to make such a natural job of it. With Savalas, talking to himself seems simply an extension of his eccentric oddness. His scenes with the many mannequins creates pleasingly perverse overtones.Whilst this a good, unusual horror, the actual scares are pretty tame, despite Sommer's enthusiastic reactions. Methodical, solid and weird, with the overall effect although playful, is sadly lacking in genuine tension.

This movie was excellent in every level! Hell, it might be even my favorite Italian horror movie and it is one of my 20 favorite horror movies ever. To explain this movie's brilliance, I should explain a little bit of backstory... This is the movie the director Mario Bava wanted to do for years, but no studio wanted to pick this project up, because the story is so open to interpretation and so non-linear that they thought it would be a flop. Well, he got what he wanted, he could shoot the movie, the problem is that when he finished the movie, the producer said that it would be a flop, convinced him to drop it out, and turn the movie into a The Exorcist rip-off, called House of Exorcism, which I did not have the displeasure of see, but based on what I read about the movie I can say that I'm not losing much. House of Exorcism was a critical and box-office fail. The thing is, Lisa and the Devil is so good that before they blocked the movie the critics still got a screening. And the movie was a hit! Critics loved it. But thank god they restored this gem and now we get to see it in its integrity. This movie's script is genius because it truly looks and feels like a nightmare, it's truly dream-like, not some Inception bullshit. And the art direction in this movie is truly fantastical. This is one of the best looking movies I've ever watched. And it's so open-to-interpretation, that you can make whatever you want from the story, which is more simple as you think it is on first viewing. This movie should become a cult-classic, and it should be watched many many times. I watched it three times already, and I plan on watching many many more times...

"Lisa and the Devil" follows a woman touring Spain who wanders from her tour group; she becomes transfixed by a portrait of the devil in a fresco, and begins to lose sense of herself, time, and space as she seems to enter a waking nightmare.Perhaps Mario Bava's most surrealist offering, "Lisa and the Devil" was re-edited and grossly manipulated with reshoots upon its U.S. release, ending up with an entirely new title: "House of Exorcism." The differences between the two versions are so extreme that they literally are completely different films in both tone and narrative. You may be wondering how a film can so easily be reworked in such a way, but Bava's loose and unanchored narrative makes it fairly easy."Lisa and the Devil" is a legitimately engrossing epic fantasy that is both unnerving and aesthetically gorgeous. Anyone who knows Bava knows the visual flair of his films, and this one is no exception. The film retains a kitschy late sixties look to it, and in some ways reminds me of Jess Franco's "Succubus," which was made several years prior—I do think "Lisa and the Devil" is ultimately the better film, no question, but they both share in common the floaty dreamscape backdrops in which a woman finds herself.The film is genuinely weird and disorienting at times, but never in a way that disenfranchises the viewer; what's perhaps most intriguing is that it essentially begins in medias res, taking a fairly mundane situation (a woman touring a city) and throwing it straight down the rabbit hole. Even at its most incoherent, the film maintains a spellbinding quality about it. Elke Sommer has a transfixing screen presence as the titular Lisa, while Telly Savalas is appropriately creepy as the devilish figure of Leandro. The film's conclusion is downbeat and fairly unexpected; the final plane scene is inventive and phenomenally nightmarish. All in all, "Lisa and the Devil" is a great surrealist horror film, and a steadfast example of Bava's later, more narratively playful offerings. The film has aged fairly well, and retained a heady European Gothic atmosphere. The viewer really feels enough perturbation in the thick of the nightmare that it remains an overall effective film to this day, and at the very least it is a visually sharp detour into an unexpected hell. 8/10.

Lisa (Elke Sommer) is a tourist in an ancient city. When she gets lost, she finds an old mansion in which to shelter. Soon she is sucked into a vortex of deception, debauchery and evil presided over by housekeeper Leandre (Telly Savalas).Luca Palmerini calls this an "underestimated Gothic masterpiece." Jim Harper is less praising, also identifying it as "an atmospheric and stately Gothic horror", but saying it "would never have been a box office success". Those words are odd, as I suspect very few great Italian films have become successful in terms of their profits.There is another version of this film called "House of Exorcism", which was meant to cash in on the success of "The Exorcist". Some aspects seem more like ripping the original off than simply cashing in -- the puking of the pea soup, for example. Watching this version is like watching a completely different film -- so much was edited out of Bava's film and new stuff added in, I am surprised this was allowed to happen. Palmerini rightly says the changes "massacre the original film."