Nessieldwi Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Benas Mcloughlin Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Ella-May O'Brien 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.

BA_Harrison Tourist Lisa Reiner (Elke Sommer) is on holiday in Spain when she falls victim to demonic possession. A concerned priest, Father Michael (Robert Alda) attempts to exorcise the evil being.The House of Exorcism is Mario Bava's commercial flop Lisa and The Devil re-edited with new Exorcist-style footage by a producer desperate to recoup some of his investment. Many regard this new version as a travesty, a work of art butchered in the name of money (indeed, The House of Exorcism was a financial success). I, on the other hand, think that both versions stink: Lisa and The Devil is a dull, languorous ghost story that makes very little sense and House of Exorcism is a dull, languorous Exorcist rip-off that also makes very little sense.If pushed to choose, I would actually give the edge to The House of Exorcism for being a couple of minutes shorter, having more gratuitous nudity (including full frontal from Carmen Silva, who tries to tempt the priest), and for getting Elke Sommer to puke up a rubber frog.

MartinHafer "Lisa and the Devil" is one of director Mario Bava's best films. It's extremely atmospheric, very scary and has an amazing artistry about it that you just don't expect from a horror film. Sadly, however, some dirt-bags decided to take Bava's excellent film and re-edit it into a new movie! So, they sloppily filmed some new scenes (complete with LOTS of nudity) and pasted it and the original picture together to make it an incoherent mess of a movie. It's terrible in most every way and I am pretty sure Bava must have been ticked about this. Fortunately, while this movie truly is terrible, it IS available on the DVD with "Lisa and the Devil" so you can compare the two and appreciate the original film. It's really an interesting experience and one you can do (at least in the USA) by streaming both versions of the movie.

jonbecker03 first of all, let me say that i am reviewing the "house of exorcism"/Robert Alida version of this film. secondly, let me clarify my own beliefs. i am not a religious person. in fact, if anything i am Anti-religious. i am an agnostic who has been influenced by a secularized version of Buddhist philosophy. Buddhism is a philosophy for me, not a religion. however, the Buddhist concept of the "middle way" has made a great impression on me. (i take the concept of the "middle way" seriously, much more seriously than most people take their religions.) the "middle way" is neither "good" nor "evil." following the middle way might be conceptualized as treading a path BETWEEN good and evil. or, better yet, it could be seen as an ESCHEWAL of both good and evil, as a resolve to seek moderation with aesthetics and pragmatism (but NOT morality) as one's guides. i do not believe in any kind of morality PER SE. there are other ways to look at life apart from the "moral" view. one can look at life in aesthetic terms, a la Oscar Wilde. one could also look at life via the (essentially amoral) "pragmatic" viewpoint of john Dewey and Richard Rory. we have Oscar Wilde, john Dewey and Richard Rory (not to mention Derrida and Foucault and, of course, shakyamuni). we really don't need Jesus, moses, or Muhammad. third, i have never seen "the exorcist" and have no desire to do so. my interest is in films on the periphery, NOT on mainstream bourgeois cinema. "house of exorcism" may have been influenced by "the exorcist," but it should be judged as an entirely separate work of art and the elements it contains should not be viewed in relation to anything contained in the earlier film. now that that's out of the way, on to "house of exorcism." HOE could be read as a formulaic horror film, as a story of good against evil in which "good" emerges as triumphant. or it could be read against the grain as a story of evil against good in which evil wins out in the end, or in which at the very least the concepts of good and evil are discredited or called into question. the most sympathetic character in the film is Elinor, the young lady whose spirit inhabits the body of Lisa. Elinor is an essentially amoral (yet not unenlightened) woman. when she was alive she satisfied her lust, having sex in order to sate her physical urges instead of for reasons of love. her impotent husband was, shall we say....less than understanding of her needs, and ended up killing her. so Elinor has returned from the dead and is now (understandably) somewhat bitter. the specter of Elinor is a "truth teller." she tells the truth, or at least the truth AS SHE KNOWS IT, and the only truth that any of us know is the truth AS WE KNOW IT. she uses a kind of "streetlevel postmodern" speech, employing the "f bomb" and other "swear" words. (i would call them "aware" words, words of awareness and sensitivity meant to express strong emotions.) some people (inhibited prudes) may be offended by this language, but as far as i am concerned the point is that we SHOULDN'T be offended by this kind of speech or by ANY kind of speech. (if we insist upon "being offended," we should reserve that prerogative for ACTIONS, not for mere SPEECH ACTS.) the father asks Elinor where she comes from and she says "from far way, from incest and adultery." (which may be factually correct.) the priest is unsatisfied with this answer and she says that she came "from a c*nt." (brilliant. truer words have never been spoken.) at one point, the father labels Elinor as "evil." Elinor responds by saying that the priest and his church are evil. now i would part company with Elinor at this point. i don't think that the church is evil....just unnecessarily and, as such, counterproductive. as for labeling any person or spirit as "evil": the universe is a moral vacuum. "good" and "evil" are BOTH figments of the bourgeois imagination. but i can see why some people might find the church and its hypocrisy to be so distasteful that they are tempted to label them as "evil." the film ends with the priest performing an exorcism at the mansion where Elinor once lived. one could view this ritual as a "triumph," as an act sending Elinor's "evil" spirit back to "Hell." but from a pragmatist/methodologically rational point of view, i would see the exorcism as an empty ritual. Elinor lives on, or at least what she stands for survives. Elinor lives on as the symbol not of evil but rather of an amoral yet enlightened pragmatism........ p.s.--earlier in the film we see telly savalas (the "devil") sucking a lollipop. in the last scene, we see Robert Alida wielding an aspergillum (holy water dispenser)....which looks quite a bit like a lollipop. now, as far as i am concerned, the telly savalas character represents not "evil" but rather a kind of "pragmatism" (whether one views it as "enlightened" pragmatism, "unenlightened," or somewhere in between is up to you). in any case, the lollipop of telly savalas is much more powerful than any priest's holy water dispenser. ("who loves ya, baby?")

scott-palmer2 I remember well in 1975 when in High School a bunch of us went to see House of Exorcism-which we all thought was better than the much overrated The Exorcist. Many years later I got a video of what was called Lisa and the Devil, which I thought was the same film under a different title. However this is NOT the case: Lisa and the Devil and House of Exorcism are two different films. When I saw the Lisa and the Devil version it had nothing to do with the film of my youth, and I was quite disappointed as I found that version quite boring-there was no possessed Elke Sommer or the Robert Alda priest character (although Telly Savalas was marvellous in both versions). Luckily a recent DVD had BOTH versions, so I was able to see the original after many years.Unlike many of the reviews, I think House of Exorcism was the better of the two, and I am not alone, even though posted reviews seem to like the "Lisa" version better. NOW here comes the truth, which most people don't know. When the original film(Lisa and the Devil)was finished in 1973, it was shown to many distributors-none of whom thought it was any good. Two years later the "redone" version, called House of Exorcism, was made-using much of the same footage of the other film but now having Elke Sommer possessed by the devil and in hospital, and having Robert Alda as the priest who not only exorcises the devil from Elke, but also the house where she had stayed. The same distributors who had shown no interest in the other film now decided to go ahead with House of Exorcism-and the result was that it made millions (at a time when it was still only a dollar or two to see a film). The bottom line here is that millions of people went to see House of Exorcism, while nobody went to see Lisa and the Devil.So in conclusion I guess that all the distributors, as well as millions of filmgoers, preferred House of Exorcism!