There are bad movies, and then there are movies that feel like a curse. The House of Exorcism isn’t just a bad movie—it’s a stitched-together cinematic crime scene, an unholy Frankenstein’s monster of regurgitated footage, bad dubbing, and last-minute possession. It’s what happens when studio executives sniff the trail of The Exorcist’s success and say, “Hey, let’s take that quiet, artsy ghost movie Bava made and turn it into demon porn for drive-ins.”
They should’ve left the ghost alone.
.
👻 The Origins: Bava’s “Lisa and the Devil” Gets Possessed by Capitalism
In 1973, Mario Bava made Lisa and the Devil, a surreal, dreamlike descent into madness starring the luminous Elke Sommer and the ever-bald Telly Savalas. It didn’t sell. Why? Because it was a beautiful, nonsensical art film that traded plot for perfume ads and mannequins. That film disappeared into international distribution hell, and the producers—desperate for cash—panicked.
So they did what any rational producer would do: hired another director, force-fed the film a load of demonic possession clichés, and hacked it to pieces. The House of Exorcism was born—Bava’s dreamy art film drowned in pea soup and dubbed screaming.
🧠 The Plot (?): Lisa, Possessed and Pissed Off
Elke Sommer reprises her role as Lisa, although you wouldn’t know it because she now spends half the movie strapped to a hospital bed, vomiting theological slurs like Linda Blair’s distant Eurotrash cousin. She wanders into a church, collapses, and wakes up under the care of a priest and a doctor, both of whom clearly skipped Medical Ethics 101.
Intercut with this are chunks of Lisa and the Devil, still intact in color and elegance, but now rudely interrupted by dubbed lines like “The Devil is in me!” and “You want to f*** me, Father, don’t you?!”
What follows is a tonal car crash: a possession story shoved like a square peg into Bava’s round, surrealist masterpiece. You’ve got holy water and boobs, crucifixes and mannequins, murder and mood lighting. It’s a carnival of mismatched limbs, stitched together with a rusted bone saw.
👩 Elke Sommer: Saintly Patience, Demonic Dialogue
Poor Elke. She gives everything, again, to this role—though this time “everything” includes projectile vomiting and screaming sexually charged Latin while chained to a bed like a Gothic pin-up in a Catholic fever dream. It’s a thankless job, but she dives into it with those wide, terrified eyes and soft Euro whispers like she doesn’t know she’s in a reshoot hellscape.
Her dual performance—ethereal Lisa from the original cut, and now snarling, demonically possessed Lisa 2.0—is jarring. It’s like watching Grace Kelly suddenly bark like a junkyard dog between monologues. There’s no nuance. Just spittle, sweat, and script pages scrawled in panic.
🍭 Telly Savalas, Again: But Now with 50% Less Sense
Savalas returns as the enigmatic Leandro, still licking lollipops and smirking through dialogue like he’s trying to seduce the wallpaper. In Lisa and the Devil, he was cryptic, cool, and eerily charming. Here, in House of Exorcism, his scenes are so aggressively out of context they feel like security footage from another planet.
He’s barely explained, barely connected, and completely unhinged. It’s like the editor asked, “What’s the most confusing part of this character?” and then decided to double it.
🎬 Bava’s Direction… or What’s Left of It
Make no mistake—this is not really a Mario Bava movie. It’s a Bava remix, directed in part by Alfredo Leone, who helped turn Bava’s hauntingly ambiguous vision into a carnival ride of cheap shocks. Gone is the painterly atmosphere, the slow, eerie unraveling of time and death. In its place: shouting. And barfing. And crucifixes.
It’s cinematic necromancy: taking a corpse and poking it until it moans something that sounds like “profit margin.” Every time a beautiful Bava sequence emerges—like a corridor soaked in red, or a strange dreamlike tableau—it’s immediately undercut by hospital yelling and bodily fluids. If you want to ruin a Monet, just staple a Saw poster to it. That’s the vibe.
🧟 The Exorcism: Because the 70s Demanded It
By 1975, The Exorcist had become the holy grail of horror profits, and everyone wanted in on the demonic action. But The House of Exorcism feels like it read the Wikipedia entry on possession films and then chugged a bottle of sacramental wine.
We get a priest with sexual repression issues. A possessed woman spewing vulgarities. Flashbacks to implied rape. And more crucifix thrusting than a late-night confession booth fantasy. But unlike The Exorcist, there’s no psychological depth, no atmosphere of encroaching evil. Just sweaty people in white coats yelling about Satan like they’re arguing over a parking ticket.
💉 Hospital of the Damned
The hospital setting is perhaps the most unintentionally hilarious part of the film. It’s one giant stage of awkward acting and theological improv. Characters burst into rooms with the urgency of someone realizing they forgot their lines and just shout “She must be cleansed!” while a nurse weeps in the corner like she wandered in from a Bergman film.
And then there’s the priest. He looks and acts like a man who got his seminary degree from a pamphlet. His idea of exorcism is shouting vaguely biblical things while standing uncomfortably close to a naked woman covered in goo. It’s less “holy warrior” and more “creepy neighbor with a fetish.”
📼 Final Thoughts: An Exorcism of Taste
The House of Exorcism is the kind of movie that gives both Bava and demonic possession a bad name. It’s an art film hijacked mid-flight by marketing demons, stitched into a horror show for the sleazy grindhouse crowd. There are moments of beauty buried in the wreckage—leftovers from Lisa and the Devil that survived the crucifixion—but they’re too rare to matter.
What could have been a poetic meditation on death and memory becomes a B-movie dumpster fire filled with shrieking priests, vomiting women, and shame. Watching it is like chewing tinfoil while someone yells scripture in your face.
Final Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2 out of 5 split personalities)
Because somewhere deep inside this disaster is a good movie screaming to get out… and then vomiting all over the altar.