Starring Telly Savalas, Elke Sommer, Sylva Koscina, Alessio Orano, Gabriele Tinti
Directed by Mario Bava & Alfredo Leone
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)
A priest tries to free a young woman of the evil spirit possessing her, and the spirit tells him of the macabre encounters the woman had with her depraved family.
As explained to me by friend Troy Howarth, Mario Bava originally filmed the tale of Lisa Reiner's ill-fated visit to the house of her former doppelgänger in Lisa And The Devil, but this release combined that film with a new framing story with the evil possession material, which Bava had no association with. The new scenes are patterned after the story of The Exorcist, and are so derivative of that film, one can't imagine that there wasn't any type of legal action involved after its release. Although Sommer is certainly convincing in playing the woman suffering the violent possession, the two stories hardly fit together and are rather awkwardly meshed. The Bava material is, as characteristic of the director, beautifully shot with excellent use of color, and offers up a sordid tale of lust, murder, and revenge, and I agree it would much better be presented on its own.
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