Lisa and the Devil (Mario Bava, 1973)

While on holiday in a Spanish town, Lisa (Elke Sommer) separates from her friends and gets lost.

Unable to find her party, Lisa ends up hitching a ride with an unhappy couple Sophie (Sylva Koscina) and Francis (Eduardo Fajardo). When the car breaks down, Lisa and her companions wind up as guests at a nearby estate where they become uncomfortable guests of the owner (Alida Valli) and her son (Alessio Orano), who develops an unhealthy fixation on Lisa.

While Lisa and the other characters struggle to figure out what is going on, butler Leandro (Telly Savalas) sucks on a lollipop and sits back to enjoy the show...

Directed by the master of Italian horror, Mario Bava, Lisa and the Devil has been on my radar for over a decade. My local arthouse has been running a series of classic films as part of a season on 'identity horror', and Lisa was one of them.

Infamously re-cut and partially reshot by producer Alfredo Leone to cash in on the success of The Exorcist, Lisa... is one of the Italian master’s final works.

After his previous film, Baron Blood, became a big hit, Bava was given complete creative control and it shows - the movie’s atmosphere is strong, the photography is beautiful and the effects are effective rather than realistic. Bava started out in special effects and as a cinematographer - he became famous for his gifts for delivering strong material on the smell of an oily rag.

Aside from his debut Black Sunday, which is regarded as one of the finest hour movies ever made (it is one of my personal favourites), Bava is known as the originator of the 'Giallo', a subgenre of mystery thrillers renowned for their emphasis on hyper-violent murders. From Blood and Black Lace (1964) - regarded as one of the earliest gailli - Bava's subsequent additions to the genre push it in different directions - Hatchet for the Honeymoon plays the action out from the murderer's perspective; Twitch of the Death Nerve pushes the genre to its most nihilistic extreme, with multiple murderers fighting over an inheritance until no one is left alive.

A surreal descent into hell, Lisa and the Devil is only tangentially related to the genre, but in its focus on a small group of characters in an isolated location, it feels like a perverse inversion of the template - the story that Lisa stumbles into feels so familiar, and is treated so cursorily that it almost comes across as parody.

Even the components - a wealthy family on an isolated estate, riven by deceit and perverse urges - feel past their use-by date.

Once the players are stuck on the estate, any lingering semblance of cause and effect, time and place, fall apart.

One of the primary attractions of Mario Bava's work is his unsettling aesthetic - the movie features super bright technicolor, mise-en-scene crowded with creepy dummies, and judicious use of the old fish-eye lense.

In certain respects, it feels similar to The Shining - the isolated setting; the 'daytime nightmare' aspect of the photography (Bava's use of super bright technicolor is incredibly unsettling); the ultimate revelation that Lisa - like Jack Torrance - is and has always been a part of the family’s story

There are some dead spots, and most of the acting is wooden, but the big selling point - aside from Bava's aesthetic - is Telly Savalas as the satanic Leandro.

From the outset, Bava establishes Leandro's control over the movie, with a close-up of Savalas smiling straight at the camera.

Bava does not hide Leandro's true identity - Sommer literally walks around the corner from a massive fresco of the Devil, and immediately runs into the eerily similar Savalas, who is buying a life-size dummy of a man.

In the 'story', Leandro is the butler to this creepy family, both servant, overseer and an audience for the character's antics. For a majority of the runtime, his Satan is basically a background presence, observing and commenting on the other characters as they bumble around the estate.

He talks shit behind their backs, seems to delight in their panic and frustration, and he also seems a little bored by the exercise. Savalas plays the role with a droll charm, pushing his role's servility just ever-so-slightly over the top.

While Sommer is buffeted by events, it feels like the family are running through the same melodramatic storyline over and over again. Savalas’s Devil can barely be bothered to play his role. You get the impression he's played versions of this scenario out countless times already, constantly tinkering with the movements and identities of the characters to see how the scenario  plays out.

At times it feels like Leandro is pushing the story toward the ending because he wants to skip the boring parts - like exposition or character development. The most interesting murder is a spur-of-the-moment act - Sophie runs her husband over after he mocks the fact that her lover - their driver - has been killed.

Every time the movie feels like it is building toward the melodrama its story implies, Bava undercuts it, or focuses on Leandro doing something totally banal - like talking to a dummy, or attempting to bum a cigarette off a guest (and then, in the film's funniest moment, returning it as soon as his 'boss', the Countess, looms up behind him).

Savalas is so magnetic, he gives Lisa and the Devil a weird sense of gravity - the story may make no sense, the English dub may reduce the other characters to cardboard cliches, but Savalas is so good and in tune with Bava's direction that the film does not collapse.

Through Savalas, the film gains an offbeat, pitch-black vein of comedy that adds to the movie's off-kilter atmosphere.

It is not in danger being my favourite, but Lisa and the Devil is definitely worth checking out, and Savalas makes for one of the more fascinating versions of the Prince of Darkness I have seen.

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