Lisa and the Devil vs. The House of Exorcism

With "The House of Exorcism" featured as part of the lineup at next week's Drive-In Super MonsterRama, I thought this was a perfect excuse to gush about one of Mario Bava's most surreal works. If you're a huge Bava fan, or even just a TV junkie who watched a lot of cable movie reruns in the 1980s, you will probably already know this story, but in case you don't then read on.

"The House of Exorcism" began it's toad-vomiting celluloid life as another movie entirely. After a string of movies that did not do well at the box office, Mario Bava delivered a worldwide hit with the movie "Baron Blood", and producer Alfred Leone agreed to give Bava the money to finally make a project he'd been wanting to make for years called "Lisa and the Devil". Shot in 1973 with such notable acting talent as Elke Sommer ("Baron Blood"), Alida Valli ("Suspiria", "Inferno"), and Telly Savalas ("Horror Express"), "Lisa and the Devil" is one of Bava's most indulgent films, a dreamlike narrative full of cryptic moments that are never fully explained but which have an unsettling effect on the viewer. Sommer plays Lisa, a young tourist who becomes separated from the rest of her traveling party and finds herself alone in an unfamiliar city, where she has a bizarre encounter with a man who seems to mistake her for someone else. When he becomes aggressive, she pushes him and he falls down a long flight of stone stairs, apparently dead. Now convinced she has killed someone, Lisa runs off to find help in the apparently deserted city. When she finally finds other people, she's picked up by a married couple and their chauffeur, but after the car breaks down, they're forced to seek shelter in a nearby mansion. The mansion is inhabited by a Countess (Alida Valli) and her weird son Max (Alessio Orano), who is immediately smitten with Lisa and begs the group to stay the night. Overseeing everything is Leandro (Telly Savalas), the unflappable butler of the mansion, who just happens to resemble the fresco Lisa saw in the village square depicting the Devil carrying souls to the underworld. Nothing good comes of this arrangement.

"I refuse to speak of disgusting things, because they disgust me!"

"Lisa and the Devil" is a visual experience where the plot makes little obvious sense. There are recurring themes of mistaken identity, reincarnation, and characters who reappear as either corpses or mannequins, but the script never really states anything explicitly. There are several gruesome moments, but it's fair to say that "Lisa and the Devil" is a slow burn that never blazes. 

"Tell me the truth, does this hat make me look fat?"

"Mein gott, zis ees not Peck and Peck!"

Maybe that's why, when Bava finished the film and offered it to film distributors, nobody wanted it. With no companies interested in releasing the movie, it sat on the shelf until 1975, when Alfred Leone got the idea to try and recoup the film's costs by recutting it and creating an "Exorcist" cash-in, inserting newly filmed footage of Elke Sommer possessed and Robert Alda as an attending priest who attempts to exorcise Lisa's demon. Bava understandably at first refused to cut apart his Mona Lisa, and also objected to the content of the possession scenes, but eventually he got on board after Leone decided to direct the new scenes himself. The finished product, "The House of Exorcism", played American cinemas and drive-ins beginning in the summer of 1976. Although the new version was marketable due to its trendy possession theme, the new scenes with Elke Sommer shrieking in demonic ecstasy and spewing green bile are ridiculous, to say the least, and what we're really seeing is a series of over the top camp moments spliced into an art film. It does give the film a more concrete plot due to the constant narration as the demon speaks to Robert Alda and provides exposition, but it's ultimately meaningless. The arty qualities of "Lisa" never coalesce with the trashy puke-gasm that the possession scenes are obliged to give, so "The House of Exorcism" is one of the most schizophrenic movies you're likely to see in your lifetime. This in itself is a reason to be thrilled about it, not to mention the fact that the gorgeous Elke Sommer seems so committed to her character that she allowed herself to be made ugly for this trashy piece of exploitative filth. It's almost like performance art.

"Tell me your name!"
"I am known as Purloin!"

Fortunately, both versions of the film have remained in circulation for years, "Lisa and the Devil" playing on television frequently in the 70s and 80s and "The House of Exorcism" of course making the rounds in theaters in 1976 (and probably as the second or third feature at drive-ins for the remainder of the decade). IMDB claims that the original cut of "Lisa" premiered on television in 1983, but I distinctly remember watching it on TV late at night years before that, probably around 1977. The film made a deep impression on me, despite the fact that I had no idea what was going on, but I was caught up in its otherworldly atmosphere. "Lisa and the Devil" was the first Mario Bava film I saw, and actually may have been the first Italian horror film I ever saw as well. I remember being haunted by the eerie theme music, and also the bizarre ending of the film ("The House of Exorcism" unforgivably cuts the original ending and substitutes an obligatory but ultimately pointless scene where the priest performs an exorcism, not on Elke Sommer but on the house that contains the evil spirit haunting her). Even though "The House of Exorcism" is a grotesque mutilation of "Lisa and the Devil", you can still see a lot of the original beauty in this cut of the film, because Bava's outstanding cinematography is always present. Plus it's just really fun.

Marilyn Burns (1950-2014)

I will never forget the way Marilyn Burns drew me into the terrifying heart of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre". After obsessing over it for years--a 1981 re-release played local theaters and no sensible adult would take an 11-year-old me to see it--I watched it alone in the late 1980s on VHS. I wasn't prepared for how the movie made me feel. It unsettled me in a way I had never experienced up to that point. As a kid, I had seen "Halloween" on TV in 1979, and "ALIEN" the year after. Somewhere in there I had also seen "Night of the Living Dead". All of those films stuck with me because of the way they shocked me, but "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" was so brutal to me, it truly shook me and upset me.

It took me a long time to realize that the reason the movie works so well is because of how Marilyn Burns connects with the audience. The rest of the movie is brilliant, but her performance is so crucial that if she hadn't risen to the occasion, the movie might not have been as great. She's in a sustained state of absolute terror in the final third of the film, and she just does not let up for one second. The movie works so well because it looks so real, and she seemed like a real person pushed to the brink of anything she had ever experienced in her life. It blew my fucking mind.

Somewhere in the 80s, slasher movies had become totally boring and passe. A lot of them had great effects, or an interesting gimmick, but I usually compared their final girls to Jamie Lee Curtis. When I see them now, I realize what most of the lesser films really needed was a performance on the level of Marilyn Burns.

Farewell to H.R. Giger.

"My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy. A good many people think as I do. If they like my work they are creative...or they are crazy."
                                                                                                   
                                                                                       - H.R. Giger, 1979


Giger's dark legacy can't be overestimated. Although his most well-known accomplishment was his crucial art design in 1979's "ALIEN", his lengthy career as a multimedia artist was so much more than just that. His bizarre, beautiful, disturbing genius will be missed.

April Ghouls 2014 roundup!

I don't know how you spent your weekend, but I spent mine staying up all night watching movies with a bunch of fellow horror geeks at the second annual April Ghouls Drive-In Monsterama at the Riverside Drive-In in Vandergrift, PA. This year's lineup was extremely inspired and classic, with classics like "Carrie" and "Suspiria" to lower budget films like "The Beast Within" and "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things".

Friday night's lineup began with "The Town That Dreaded Sundown", a 1976 flick that's about as "drive-in exploitation" as you can possibly get, even though it was easily the most expendable movie on the program. It seems to have been made to entertain distracted drive-in patrons who were partying in their cars and not paying much attention, as the faux documentary format of the film really drags. The movie is really nothing more than a series of murder scenes strung together by snore-inducing investigative scenes, although the presence of Andrew Prine ("Grizzly", "Hannah, Queen of the Vampires") helps liven the interest for a while. The movie also features a memorable image of its killer, who wears a white cloth sack over his head much like Jason Voorhees did years later in "Friday the 13th Part 2".

Another 1976 film followed, one that is a little more well-known and widely seen: Brian DePalma's "Carrie". I never was a huge fan of this movie, despite the fact that it seems to be so beloved as an iconic horror film, but it played great on this bill and I admired it a little more for its excellent pacing. "Carrie" never lags for too long, especially considering the movie that came before it. Also, camp is king in "Carrie", from Piper Laurie's almost comedic turn as Carrie's zealot mother to the almost ridiculous interaction between John Travolta and Nancy Allen as the film's villainous teenagers. It's an abbreviated take on Stephen King's novel, and definitely not DePalma's best film, but it's pretty good for what it is.

"Suspiria" came third, and this movie never disappoints me when I see it on a big screen. I wasn't even bitter about the fact that our print was the standard US version, with the worst violence snipped out of it and an entire subplot removed--most scenes with the blind piano player Daniel have been removed, making the reason for his death an even greater mystery to anybody who has never seen the uncut film.  However, the cuts are not fatal to the movie, as Argento's stunning vision still showed through.

The final Friday flick was Wes Craven's original 1977 "The Hills Have Eyes", which has a little more plot than his debut "Last House on the Left", but retains that earlier film's confrontational approach to its violence. I dare anybody to have a problem with any movie that features Dee Wallace! I just dare you. OK, wait, she was in Rob Zombie's "Halloween", so it's OK if you have a problem with that one.

Speaking of "Halloween", the one and only 1978 original was the lead-off film on Saturday night's program, and although I've seen it in a theater a number of times, seeing it at the drive-in seemed almost too perfect. After all, drive-ins were undoubtedly important to that movie's original success in 1978, as they were still a large part of the moviegoing experience, especially among young people. Like everyone else on the planet, I know the movie inside out by this time, but the older I get, the more I notice how young Jamie Lee Curtis was when she made this big screen debut as babysitting warrior Laurie Strode. 

It had been a good while since the last time I saw 1982's "The Beast Within", a film I remember mostly because of all the coverage it got in Fangoria and Famous Monsters. When I finally saw it on HBO a few years after its theatrical release, I remember thinking it was awful. Indeed, it's a low budget experience, and the much-heralded special effects are now extremely dated. However, in spite of a few shots that don't work (such as a really fake-looking dummy shot involving a startlingly long tongue), the monster FX in "Beast" are actually pretty effective. The unpleasant story involves a teenager who is transforming into a hideous creature due to his unfortunate lineage, and it gets right to the action, not even giving us any images of Michael before shit starts to go haywire with him. A little like his counterpart Carrie, Michael finds that adolescence is a scary time when you can easily be embarrassed in front of girls--especially when you're turning into a cicada monster.

Yet another scary parable for those difficult teenage years, "Phantasm" is one of those movies that really makes no sense the first time you see it, with a plot as bizarre and random as anything you're likely to see. Told from the point of view of a young teenage boy whose close family members are all being taken from him in death, the movie is almost European in the way it asks you to draw your own conclusions about what is actually happening on screen at any given moment. The movie is literally a nightmare, with dreamlike plotting and elliptical pacing, but somehow the film successfully brings together outlandish elements of interdimensional travel, zombie dwarf slaves, teleportation, brain-draining silver sentry spheres, and shape-shifting creatures. Angus Scrimm is, of course, unforgettable as the movie's villain The Tall Man, and director Don Coscarelli fills the movie with bizarre images that are somehow never too ambitious for the movie's obviously tiny budget.

The crowning jewel of this year's April Ghouls was "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things", a film I'd never seen on a big screen before, and there couldn't have been a better choice for the final movie. "Children" began around 3:15am, and although I've ranted about my deep love for this film before, suffice it to say that this movie's cheap and effective thrills looked even more cheap and effective at a misty late night drive in theater. Ask around, and you'll find that this movie's fans are wild about the scene where an entire cemetery full of rotting corpses comes alive with activity, zombies being ejected from the ground in a fantastic sequence that seems almost like ballet at times. Although any movie where dead people come back to life is asking a lot for your suspension of disbelief, "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things" rewards you for your efforts with tons of cartoonishly grisly zombies. And while the film's violence isn't as gory or explicit as many other flicks in the genre, it's got some indelible images within its reels.

In between films, vintage exploitation trailers ran amok, and I saw so many classic drive-in films represented here I lost count. Some I recall are "Folks at Red Wolf Inn", "Dracula's Dog", "Embryo", "Futureworld", "Piranha", "The Car", "The Manitou", "The Sentinel", "Burnt Offerings", "Tentacles"...the list goes on and on. 

Sometimes it's hard to remember that there even was a time when we couldn't own films for viewing in our own homes whenever we wanted. We had to gather in places like a drive-in to experience them, and oftentimes it was impossible to see them again unless they came around a second time. Of course home video changed all that, and no film fan could resist the allure of being able to see your favorite films whenever you want. But when we gained that possibility, we lost a little of the magic, too. I can't say enough about how much I love these yearly events, and how lucky I feel that I don't have to drive too far to get there, as some patrons drive hundreds of miles to take part in the kind of time travel the Monsterama festivals represent. The love I have for a lot of these films doesn't come entirely from my enjoyment of the films themselves--if this was the only reason, a lot of us wouldn't be so compelled to watch these movies over and over like we do. Equally important is the cultural reference these movies represent for us. When I see them at the drive-in like this, it takes me back to where my love for horror films came from in the first place: my own youth, and a time when it seemed like this kind of imagination and creativity would just go on and on. 

Horror Express (1972)

If you watched scary movies on TV in the 70s and early 80s, "Horror Express" was inescapable--if you don't recognize the title, you probably thought of it the same way I did, as "that movie with the white eyes bleeding from the head". I always caught it late at night, long after I should have been in bed, and it's one of those rare films that is just as good whether you're an adult or a kid. The plot finds two British men of science aboard the Trans Siberian Express fighting a shape shifting evil presence that one of them has freed from a cave during an expedition in Manchuria. The fact that the two leads are none other than Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing immediately gives "Horror Express" all the cred it would ever need, and even though it wasn't made by Hammer Films, the fact that they're in the movie makes it seem that way.

"Dude...I've been sleeping for a couple million years, what time is it?"

Professor Saxton (Christopher Lee) is an anthropologist who discovers what appears to be the fossilized remains of a prehistoric humanoid creature. With the creature's body packed in a crate, he boards the Trans-Siberian Express in China, along with fellow British scientist Dr. Wells (Peter Cushing). The two are rival colleagues, and Saxton is originally intent on keeping his discovery a secret until he can return to England. Before they even leave China, a local thief is found dead on the train platform next to the crate, his eyes bleeding and now completely white. A Polish Count and his wife encounter the scene while boarding, and their spiritual advisor, a crazed monk (Alberto de Mendoza), insists the contents of the crate are evil.  Wells becomes suspicious of Saxton's "fossil", and pays the baggage man to look inside the crate once everyone has boarded. When the man looks into the crate, the creature reanimates and kills him with its glowing red eye, which causes the man's eyes to go white. The creature then picks the lock and escapes, hiding on the train and claiming other passengers as victims, all of them found with white, bleeding eyes. Finally it is gunned down by a police inspector, Mirov (Julio Pena), but before it dies it locks eyes with him, somehow transferring itself to his own body.

"You call THIS vodka?"

Wells and his assistant perform an autopsy on one of the victims, deducing that the creature has drained its victims brains of all memories and knowledge. By extracting fluid from the dead fossil's eye, they are able to see images in the liquid that reveal a prehistoric Earth, as well as the planet as seen from space. The evil presence is an alien form of intelligent energy that is able to jump from body to body, and has survived on the planet for millions of years, transferring hosts until it became trapped in the body of the apelike creature that Saxton discovered. It is intent on absorbing enough knowledge to escape the planet and return to its own galaxy, with only Saxton and Wells in a position to stop it.

"Siberia..!? I thought we were headed for Ibiza!"

Most of the action in the film is contained to the cars of the train, which is pretty amazing when you realize that the filmmakers only had one train set that was redressed several times to simulate different cars. Legend has it that Cushing arrived on the set for this film mourning the recent death of his wife, and he informed the director that he couldn't do the film because he was too distraught. Christopher Lee intervened by simply reminiscing about old times with Cushing, who fortunately forgot all about quitting the picture and did the job after all. Just having the two of them together in the movie would have been enough, but we also get none other than Telly Savalas in a brief but juicy role as a Cossack officer who boards the train with a group of his men and roughs up the passengers in an attempt to find the "murderer"--of course his eyeballs end up like hard boiled eggs like all the other victims in the film. Another familiar face is Helga Line, who had an extensive film career in Spanish movies and appeared in several genre films, including "Vampire's Night Orgy". "Horror Express" doesn't have the budget of a Hammer film, but it's so efficient that you'd never know it. The exterior shots of the train are miniatures, but extremely well done miniatures. The glowing eyeball effects are excellent too, especially since they were probably very difficult to pull off in 1972.

An image harvested from fluid in the creature's eyeball reveals...a child's dinosaur book?

Alberto de Mendoza really steals the show as Pujardov, the mad monk whose character ends up taking center stage by the end of the film. Pujardov starts the movie by ominously warning the others that Saxton's crate contains "pure evil", melodramatically warning the others about the presence of "Satan". After it has migrated to Inspector Mirov's body, Pujardov becomes awed by it and offers to do its bidding. Instead it says to him "Fool, there's nothing worth taking in your brain." But when it is gunned down while using Mirov's body, the creature is forced to migrate into Pujardov anyway. Saxton himself declares earlier in the film that religion is superstition when one of the other characters refers to Darwin's Theory of Evolution as immoral, but at one point the creature confronts him and tempts him like the devil; faced with the fact that Saxton could kill it, it instead offers to teach him the secrets of science that it has absorbed over the millions of years it has survived. Both Saxton and the monk could be right about the creature, as it could both prove and disprove the human concept of Satan and evil in general. I love that this movie has such a great concept behind it, which makes it all the more interesting once the visual shocks are diluted by years of viewing.

"Horror Express" is definitely one of the greatest movies to feature Cushing and Lee, and they deliver a lot of the best lines as well. At one point Mirov (actually the creature) suggests that one of them could actually be the monster, to which a shocked Cushing responds "Monster? We're British, you know!" Telly Savalas is a total anachronism in this film and it's brilliant; he basically shows up, acts like Kojak for a few scenes, then turns into a white-eyed zombie. 

There are obvious parallels to "The Thing", or more specifically "Who Goes There?", the short story that inspired "The Thing", but the script is original enough that it stands on its own. The wackiest scene is when Cushing and Lee examine the liquid contents of the creature's eyeball and find that they can see images of the things the creature has seen in its lifetime, including dinosaurs (which are textbook illustrations). "Horror Express" is completely dubbed and was almost surely shot silent, with the entire audio track created in post-production. The result is a claustrophobic sound design that really enhances the atmosphere of a cramped, moving train. The gory elements are very effective, too, like one scene where Cushing uses a nasty looking saw to cut open the head of the dead porter's corpse during the autopsy. Those bleeding eyes, though...those will stick with you. I remember the sick feeling it used to give me when I watched it as a kid, with a combination of dread, excitement, and mystery.