95 mins |
Rated
M (Mature Audiences)
CENTREPIECE FILM
Lisa - an American tourist travelling in Spain - loses her tour party and seeks refuge in the tumbledown mansion of a blind countess, after being guided there by the distinctly satanic butler of the house, Leandro. The Son of the Countess notices Lisa’s striking resemblance to his dead lover and pursues her as a night of murder, strange eroticism and dark hallucination begins.
Curator’s note: Never quite what you initially perceive it to be, giallo-legend Mario Bava’s Lisa & the Devil eventually transcends its slasher thrills and becomes a haunting tone poem on the inability to escape oneself. The devilish, grinning Telly Savalas (of Kojak fame) as the lollipop-wielding butler Leandro is particularly enjoyable, as is the gorgeously designed gothic mansion setting, populated with a surreal collection of lacquered dummies. After a disastrous Cannes screening, the film never recovered and was eventually hacked up into a more commercially palatable Exorcist knock-off. We are proud to be screening the High-Definition version of Mario Bava’s original cut, in its intended, abstract form.
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CENTREPIECE FILM
Lisa - an American tourist travelling in Spain - loses her tour party and seeks refuge in the tumbledown mansion of a blind countess, after being guided there by the distinctly satanic butler of the house, Leandro. The Son of the Countess notices Lisa’s striking resemblance to his dead lover and pursues her as a night of murder, strange eroticism and dark hallucination begins.
Curator’s note: Never quite what you initially perceive it to be, giallo-legend Mario Bava’s Lisa & the Devil eventually transcends its slasher thrills and becomes a haunting tone poem on the inability to escape oneself. The devilish, grinning Telly Savalas (of Kojak fame) as the lollipop-wielding butler Leandro is particularly enjoyable, as is the gorgeously designed gothic mansion setting, populated with a surreal collection of lacquered dummies. After a disastrous Cannes screening, the film never recovered and was eventually hacked up into a more commercially palatable Exorcist knock-off. We are proud to be screening the High-Definition version of Mario Bava’s original cut, in its intended, abstract form.