"Lisa and the Devil"(1974)d/Mario Bava

We stop our kaleidoscope of covetousness tonight on a hauntingly surreal lost seventies masterwork by genre-king, Mario Bava; one of his favorite films that he regrettably never lived to see released in its original form, as was his intention.Producer Alfred Leone, desperate to find distribution in the United States after having given Bava free reign to make a non-commercial movie however he liked due to the international success of their prior collaboration,1972's Baron Blood, suggested to the director that they rework the entire film with new profane,sexual material and in essence, rip off the popular American classic, The Exorcist, in the process.Leone's troubled finished product(that Bava eventually walked away from), released as House of Exorcism in 1975, tanked to both critics and fans alike.Thought lost until a print finally surfaced in the 1990's, Bava's original vision, one of his best IMHO, is the film we'll focus on tonight, ending the week here at the Wop.
Lisa has all of the glorious cinematography and stylized directorial flare that made Bava the godfather of Italian genre cinema, bar none.Factor in a stellar ensemble cast that includes Telly Savalas(this review'll have to hold you over until I find a print of Pretty Maids,JM!), Elke Sommer, Syvia Koscina, Gabriele Tinti, and Alida Valli, some creepy atmosphere, a harrowing uneasiness and dream-like unfamiliarity, and it's transparently easy to see what a cult classic you've got on your hands.If this one isn't part of your dvd collection yet, and you're a genre fan that's true to your lollipops, baby, what are you waiting for? It's bonus time!

"Who lugs ya, dummy!" exclaims Leandro(Telly Savalas).
Lisa(Elke Sommer)notices an eccentric bald man carrying life-like mannequins through the cobbled streets of Toledo, while mesmerized by a fresco of the devil(who the man bears a striking resemblance to, mind you) with her tour group, which her guide explains survived through the ages because of a local belief that Satan himself occupies the region.She wanders off from her group to locate the source of some haunting music that catches her ear,and finds herself in an antique shop where the owner is crafting, what else, a mannequin for a customer.Her attempts to buy the responsible music box are thwarted when the owner relates that it belongs to someone already...the customer whose dummy he's working on, who turns around, and yeah, it's him.Spooked, she rushes out into the winding, ominous streets and finds herself completely astray from anything remotely familiar.She asks a few antisocial townsfolk for directions, who affably ignore her.After bumping into the quaint fellow with the dummies again, she's detained by a man who not only believes she is a former lover of his named Elena, he also resembles the mannequin the bald fellow's been lugging around.Frightened, she pushes away from him, sending him down a flight of stairs and rendering him unconscious.Still lost by nightfall, she encounters the Lehars,Francis and Sophia(Fajardo, Koscina) who instruct their chauffeur George(Gabriele Tinti)to give the poor girl a lift.The limousine stalls out in front of a colossal mansion, owned by a blind Contessa(Alida Valli) and her son Maximillian(Alessio Orano).Their butler, Leandro(Savalas) just happens to be the man who's been creeping her out all day.Fancy that.

Francis(Eduardo Fajardo) selflessly lends himself as a human rumble strip.
Max takes a shine to the attractive young tourist, insisting that she and her new friends stay for dinner amidst the Contessa's decries.While Francis showers, Sophia passionately fucks her chauffeur.Meanwhile, Lisa spots the man who harrassed her peering through her window,ending up in Max's arms as she watches Leandro drag the man away...only it's just a mannequin.Things get stranger as the night progresses.Max takes an extra piece of after-dinner cake upstairs to...while the Contessa remarks after feeling Lisa's face,"You shouldn't have come back, now it's too late."A pair of scissors does in George the driver, sending Sophia into hysterics.She, in turn, believes she's avenging his death when she promptly runs her husband over with the car six times, well short of Pasolini's record.A weird love triangle is unfolding between Max, Lisa, and Carlo, the man who insists she is his former flame,and while holding her in a room full of dummies and statues, he is bludgeoned from behind.Sophia witnesses this and flees, only to be fatally thumped by Max.The contessa discovers Carlo in a casket in the chapel, revealing that she was formerly his wife, and that an affair between he and Elena resulted in their subsequent murders.Max takes Lisa to meet Elena, a mummified corpse in bed, while putting her under with a trusty chloroform rag.He tries to lay some surprise sex on her with the corpse in the same bed(!!).It doesn't work out.As Leandro prepares to make Lisa into a new puppet,Max and his mother argue over why he's killed their dinner guests(!),to which he voclaizes his fears that they were going to take his Lisa away,and when she suggests that he ties up the final loose end by getting rid of her as well,he shanks her in the labonza,instead, leading up to a dizzyingly surreal shocker of a nightmare climax...that you'll have to see for yourselves!

"A little lower,you're licking my sacrum." thinks Sophia(Sylvia Koscina).
Savalas' lollipops(which he opted for instead of gumdrops)were a personal touch that he would carry on into his hit television series Kojak afterwards.Also interesting to note, a scene where Leandro breaks both of a corpse's legs at the feet to stuff it into a coffin is a nifty tribute to H.P. Lovecraft.When Alida Valli appeared on the set in purple, it sent Bava into a superstitious fervor, as he believed the color was bad luck, leading to strange complications on the production.For the reworking, scenes with Robert Alda portraying a priest who exorcises demons from Sommer's character were shot afterwards, with his role introduced to the story via flashbacks.The rough language and sexuality that Leone demanded for House ultimately led to Bava setting up the actors and cameras and in protest, leaving them for the producer to shoot.As for Lisa, it's safe to regard the film as one of his true classics; some Bava-ites claim it is his final masterpiece, though I enjoy his later Cani arrabbiati(1974) and Shock(1977) too much to fully agree with anyone who says that.Three wops and a strong recommendation.

Is it technically a threesome if the mummified corpse slumped next to the two of you never participates?Just wonderin'.

"Justine"(1968)d/Jesus Franco

Tonight we examine the screen adaption of a book once called "the most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination"(that's a tall order,shorty) by no less than Napoleon Bonaparte, resulting in the thirteen year imprisonment of its author;a man known the world over as the father of Sadism, the Marquis DeSade.An ambitious undertaking for any director, granted, and somewhat ironic that none other than Jesus Franco would helm the project during one of his more prolific and respectable periods of work.Perhaps the true irony here is that Franco doesn't bung the whole production down the lavvy, despite his signature eternity-long zooming hand held shots that often end up blurred and out-of-focus, or more often, on some broad's hairy gravy boat, on display for all to see.In this film, the bush just happens to belong to the daughter of silver screen swashbuckler,Tyrone Power,whose fatal heart attack came ten years earlier in 1958, and not directly after screening Romina in her birthday suit here as one might deduce.Also lending credibility to the Italian production are performances by Franco regular Maria Rohm, the one and only Klaus Kinski(who's kind of wasted here, only bagging silent screen time as DeSade himself), the actress behind the husky screen voice of Pazuzu in The Exorcist, Mercedes McCambridge, and even local great Jack Palance, who's not only appropriately off-the-chain as a sexually deviant libertine here, he also levitates for anybody interested in seeing that sort of thing.Nothing would surprise me at this point after checking out some of the search topics that bring readers to the Wop every day.Y'never know.So does Franco do the literary pornography of DeSade any justice?Read on for my verdict.

DeSade(Klaus Kinski)lets his quill do all the talking.
As we begin,the Marquis DeSade(Kinski)relates the sad tale to the viewer from the confines of prison, tortured by hallucinogenic images of, well...bare-assed women being tortured(I'm pretty sure he grooved on this sort of thing IRL).Juliette and Justine(Maria Rohm, Romina Power)get thrown out of a nunnery when their father unexpectedly dies.When Juliette's friend, Madame de Buission, turns out to be a brothel madam, the more virtuous and pure sister, Justine, bows out gracefully, while her nasty whorish sister Juliette willingly sets up camp in the whorehouse, learning all the carnal skills to make herself the apex prostitute.Meanwhile, things for Justine go from bad to progressively worse.A passing priest jacks her up for her gold doubloons and passes her on to a fat old scumbag named Du Harpin, who frames her with a gold amulet stolen from his master, Monsieur Derroches, ultimately landing her in prison.There she is befriended by Dusbois(Mercedes McCambridge),a gravelly-voiced she-assassin who takes pity on her for her innocent looks, and incorporates the young girl in a daring escape plan involving a set fire.Her sister, meanwhile, has honed her treachery to a fine point, adding murder to her growing list of unscrupulous talents; killing her madam and a rich client to boost her own pile of duckats.When Dusbois' henchman vie for dibs on deflowering their new young accomplice in the forest, she makes her escape, finding shelter and love for a short time in the home of a painter named Raymond.

Dusbois(Mercedes McCambridge),a condemned virago, still manages to set aside some quality gypo dancing time.
Her happiness with Raymond is short-lived though, as the police inquire as to her whereabouts, forcing her to flee into the woods, coming upon the shrewd and loafer-light Marquis de Bressac, who hires her as an attendant to his wife, the Marquise(genre fave Sylvia Koscina), that he's been planning to eighty-six all along.When she refuses to kill the woman for him, he kills her himself with poison and frames Justine anyway, branding a huge M(for murderer) between her smallish(but appetizing just the same!) busom.At the same time, her sister Juliette has amassed a small fortune from her wicked ways that she no longer fancies sharing with fellow prostitute Claudine, so she sinks her in the drink while bathing in a river.Just when things seem to be looking up for Justine as she finds herself in a chateau occupied by a monastic brotherhood led by Father Antonin(Jack Palance), she discovers in horror that the men are perverted hedonists in search of the highest forms of physical pleasure, torturing women that they keep as sex slaves.During a ceremony where Antonin plans to reward Justine for rapidly learning their philosophy by releasing her through torture-killing her(Englebert Humperdinck would not be amused), things go wrong and she escapes once again.Her brief lover Raymond rescues her again only to have Dusbois abduct her again, forcing her to appear nude in a stage show where the crowd notices her murderess brand, causing her to be dragged off by the police again(Phew!).Before the King's men can enforce their justice though, she is noticed by a minister's mistress who saves her life.The woman of position turns out to be Juliette herself, confessing that her life of big black evil badness turned out be less fulfilling than she thought, and her sister Justine would finally be rewarded despite her long-standing misery.Justine takes up at the palace with her sibling, and is reunited with her lover, Raymond.Awwww, that's nice.

The sweet and virtuous Justine(Romina Power), willing to break it all out for love and art.
Surprisingly, the movie is as reasonably close to the book as one could expect here, sparing audiences Justine's death at an untimely lightning bolt after confessing her sins to her sister(!).I dunno, I woulda dug seeing that, to be truthful.Franco sandwiched this release between 99 Women and Eugenie, The Story of Her Journey into Perversion, before moving on to Venus in Furs, and two Christopher Lee vehicles, The Bloody Judge and Count Dracula, the following year.The oft-nude Power would continue on in Italian film for decades, adding singing, writing, and painting to her already impressive repertoir.She does an adequate job here(though she's at least five years older than the literary model fyi), always looking the right mixture of innocence and untapped sex appeal.McCambridge, who also landed a part in 99 Women as Franco-philes will already know, bagged herself a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1949 and was once called the greatest living radio actress by none other than Orson Welles himself.Tonight's review will finally break the string of three wop movies we've had here recently, though it should be noted that a two wop Franco movie is like a three wopper for other directors, in most cases.Worth a look!

Jack Palance's portrayal of Father Antonin is based entirely on a chunk of Prosciutto di Praga...believe it....or not.