The first Mortal Kombat video game is essentially Enter the Dragon with some magic and ninjas added. So it stands to reason that the movie should be pretty much the same idea — a martial arts tournament to the death with implications for our entire world. And the movie delivers the goods.

Director Paul W. S. Anderson (Soldier, the Resident Evil films, the Death Race remakes) was totally the right actor for this film — they feel like the 90’s in concentrated form. You’ve got your hard techno beats, your neon colors, green screen early CGI and plenty of quips during the Kombat.

The realms of Earth and Outworld come together for the Mortal Kombat and create a battle to the death, with the provision that if Outworld wins Mortal Kombat ten consecutive times, its Emperor Shao Khan may invade the Earth realm.

Standing in his way are Shaolin monk Liu Kang, Hollywood action star Johnny Cage and a military officer named Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson, I Know What You Did Last Summer). Cameron Diaz was originally up for the Sonya role but got hurt during filming. Helping them is Raiden (Christopher Lambert, Highlander), the god of thunder and Earth realm’s defender.

Along the way, we meet Princess Kitana (Talisa Soto, License to Kill), Kano, Sub Zero (François Petit, who would go on to be the head trainer for the WWE in the mid 90’s), Reptile (who is played by Robin Cooke, who is also in Picasso Trigger and China O’Brien), Goro and Jax. They’re all here to be part of Shang Tsung’s tournament.

Despite Johnnny Cage defeating Goro, Shang Tsung kidnaps Sonya (who until this point had been a take charge woman and suddenly becomes a helpless girl in distress. Ah, the 90’s!) and draws them all to Outworld. There, Liu Kang faces his greatest fears and defeats the sorcerer, releasing all of the souls he had stolen, including his brother’s.

Everyone goes to the Shaolin temple to celebrate, but the skies turn dark and Shao Khan appears. With the voice of Frank Welker, he screams that he is here for everyone’s souls. All of the good guys show their fighting stances, cue the Mortal Kombat theme and we’ve set up the sequel.

Where this film gets it right is that it sticks to the source material. Better than that, it introduces concepts that would become part of the mythology of future games, such as Emperor Shao Khan, Outworld, Kitana, Jax and more.

It’s funny to me that so many critics savaged this movie. It’s fun as hell and true to its inspiration. It’s a video game version of a Hong Kong martial arts movie — a mixture of bastard pop culture that no one wants to claim as anything but a guilty pleasure. This doesn’t look like a cheap movie, as even though it’s over 20 years old, it’s packed with effects that hold up and fight scenes that continue to be impressive.

I don’t even want to tell you how many hours I put into the last Mortal Kombat game. Or brag that I know the difference between babalities, fatalities and friendships. The thing is, even if you haven’t played a single game of Mortal Kombat, you can still enjoy the movie. And if you love the game, unlike so many video game adaptions, you won’t feel let down. That’s actually high praise after some of the films I’ve endured this week.

Street Fighter features many of the characters from the game and some of them hit the mark. Many of them don’t. And for years, I wrote the film off. I wondered, why did they pick Raul Julia to play M. Bison? After finally watching it, I now know that no one else could have played him.

How much do you really love the game? Then you’ll probably hate how idiotic Ken and Ryu are. You’ll probably dislike that E. Honda isn’t Japanese. And you’ll have trouble with the fact that Dhalsim is a scientist and that Charlie and Blanka have been turned into the same character.

But if you can get away from that, you pretty much get a live action cartoon. There’s a great scene where E. Honda and Zangief (Andrew Bryniarski, Leatherface in the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) have a fight while Godzilla sound effects play. Kylie Minogue is great as Cammy, even if her costumes are a little more modest than the video game. Wes Studi makes a fine Sagat. And the fights are really fun.

Best of all, Julia really makes M. Bison sing. There’s a great scene of him trying to seduce Chun Li in his chambers and he has a portrait done of him by John Wayne Gacy. And he brings a Shakespearean gravitas to a role that a lesser actor would not work hard on at all. The fact that he was suffering from stomach cancer (he died two months before the movie was released) is amazing when you see how much he put into his performance.

Street Fighter was the first movie that Steven de Souza directed. Up to then, he’d been better known as a writer, working on films as diverse as 48 Hours, The Return of Captain Invincible, Commando, The Running Man, Bad Dreams, Die Hard, Die Hard 2 and Hudson Hawk. He was beholden to a really rough schedule while working on the film, as Capcom had a hard and fast date that he had to hit. That said — he succeeds in making a silly take on the franchise. There’s even a Goofy falling sound effect made by one of the enemy soldiers!

Instead of the poster for this film, I decided to share the image that ends the film. It made me laugh out loud and here’s hoping you’ll find it as entertaining as I do.

Andrzej Bartkowiak has been the cinematographer on three films that were nominated for Best Picture Academy Awards: The Verdict, Terms of Endearment and Prizzi’s Honor.  But he may be better known for his films that combined hip-hop and action, like Cradle 2 the Grave, Exit Wounds and Romeo Must Die. He’s also been behind two video game films: Doom and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.

That said, Time selected this as one of the top 10 worst video game movies, along with House of the Dead, Wing Commander, In the Name of the King, Hitman, BloodRayne, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Double Dragon, Street Fighter and Super Mario Brothers. Trust me — it’s not that bad. And films like this (and a few others on the list) don’t belong in the same wastebin as Uwe Boll films.

After a Mars research station is attacked, Dr. Todd Carmack sends a distress call that is answered by a team of Marines, led by Asher “Sarge” Mahonin (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). John “Reaper” Grimm (Karl Urban, Dredd) and his sister, Dr. Samantha (Rosamund Pike, star of Becca’s go to DVD, Gone Girl) are there to retrieve critical info before the base is destroyed. We learn that they were born on Mars and their parents were killed here. All that remained after their accident were skeletons of genetically enhanced humans.

Of course, all hell breaks loose — literally. Demonic monsters attack, The Rock ends up being the bad guy, innocent people get killed, a long first-person sequence happens and there’s plenty of action. Seriously, the movie is short on story and long on special effects and gore. It’s like an Alien movie without the xenomorphs, I guess. Or much excitement. It’s competently made, but an hour after it was over and I started writing this, all I could remember that I enjoyed was that the Rock played against his usual character and that Karl Urban got to be the hero.

Released in 1987 by Technos, Double Dragon is the spiritual successor to Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun (known to the US as Renegade), a game that was inspired by the high school life of creator Yoshihisa Kishimoto. Basically — you fight to survive.

When Renegade was released in the U.S., it was localized so that it appeared to be a video game version of The Warriors, with punk rock inspired bad guys. Double Dragon takes that to the next level, where Billy and Jimmy Lee (or Hammer and Spike, as the original cabinets called them) have to battle through hordes of post-apocalyptic punkers to rescue Billy’s girlfriend Marian. There had never been a game like this before, where two players could beat up a near endless array of bad guys and even steal their weapons from them. It felt like you were in a movie. So making a movie of Double Dragon — and its many sequels — seemed like a great idea.

Koga Shuko (Robert Patrick, Terminator 2) is a crime lord looking for a magic medallion called the Double Dragon, which has been broken into two pieces. He already has one half, but now he needs the other.

Meanwhile, brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee (Scott Wolf of TV’s Party of Five and Mark Dacascos, the American chairman of Iron Chef and Mani from Brotherhood of the Wolf) and their adopted mother Satori (Rambo: First Blood Part II) are racing home to beat curfew after a martial arts tournament. Oh, a curfew? Yeah, it turns out that in the Los Angeles of 2007, an earthquake has made the city an apocalypse, lorded over by gangs. One of those gangs, led by Abobo (one of the game bosses) attacks, but they’re saved by the Power Corps, led by Marian (Alyssa Milano, Commando, every 90’s boy’s bedroom wall). Coincidentally, Satori has the other half of the medallion and Shuko mutates Abobo so he can go back out and get it.

The gang attacks again with Shuko even possessing their mother. The boys escape thanks to her sacrifice and go on the run as Shuko unites the city’s gangs, which have Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes) among their members.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “This has nothing to do with the video game I’ve played and loved so much,” congratulations. Welcome to the world of 1990’s video game adaptions!

Will Billy and Jimmy finally stop being dweebs and learn how to fight? Will there by rollerblade attacks on an evil shopping mall? Wil they fight over Marian? Will there be fart jokes because all video games are really for children and not adults despite all evidence to the contrary? Who are the Power Corps and what do they have to do with Double Dragon?

Amazingly, this movie was written by Paul Dini, who created the most perfect media adaption of Batman ever, Batman: The Animated Series and also wrote for Lost. Wow. I’m kind of shocked. So I asked Dini on Twitter and was delighted by his reply:

There are some weird Frank Miller-esque talking heads on Channel 69 News, played by George Hamilton and Vanna White that try to make this movie into Robocop. Oh yeah — Andy Dick is also the station’s weatherman. They have nothing really to do with anything else in the film.

Because I come from Pittsburgh, allow me to make fun of Cleveland, where this was filmed. The boat chase sequence was filmed on the Cuyahoga River and ends with a gigantic explosion filled with 700 gallons of gasoline and 200 gallons of alcohol. Despite warnings in all manner of the news, the explosion caused a panic, leading to 210 phone calls to emergency services in 10 minutes. Oh Cleveland.

This movie defines the word missable. I have probably played hundreds of hours of the video games they inspired it and have often written my own tales in my head of my character’s motivations. Every single one, even back to when I was 16, are miles beyond this film. I’ve never seen a movie before where a bad guy hugs someone until he passes out, so there is that.

Then again, if you always wanted to watch a kid-friendly version of The Warriors, I guess this could be it.

Lisa and the Devil was shelved after a negative reception at the Cannes Market. A Bay of Blood was a box office disappointment. So Mario Bava decided to do something unlike any of his other films — developing a “poliziotteschi” film.

According to Roberto Curti’s Italian Crime Filmography, 1968-1980, poliziotteschi films “generally featured graphic and brutal violence, organized crime, car chases, vigilantism, heists, gunfights, and corruption up to the highest levels. The protagonists were generally tough working class loners, willing to act outside a corrupt or overly bureaucratic system.”

Bava filmed the entire film in chronological order, but the shoot was filled with issues. Original star Al Lettieri (The Getaway) was replaced after three days, mostly for showing up drunk. The replacement, Riccardo Cucciolla, spoke no English and had to read his lines from a script hidden inside the car (so Wikipedia says, but my copy is in Italian, so I have no idea why this was an issue).

Additionally, Bava’s son Lamberto, who was the assistant director on the film, has claimed that producer Roberto Loyola bounced all of the checks to the crew, who still finished the film within three weeks. All that remained were some cutaways and a pre-credit sequence, but Loyola went bankrupt and the film was lost in the courts.

There are numerous versions of this movie that were released in the mid 1990’s. For the interests of this article, we’ll focus on the Anchor Bay release of Kidnapped that was assembled by Alfredo Leone and Lamberto Bava.

After four crooks rob an armored truck, their getaway car is damaged and one of them is killed. The three that remain — Doc, Blade and Thirty-Two (George Eastman! Do I really need to tell you how much I love every movie this guy is in? Our site is literally his entire IMDB catalog, with movies like Stage Fright, Blastfighter, Hands of Steel, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Warriors of the Wasteland and more) — run into an underground garage, kill a woman and kidnap another named Maria (Lea Lander, Blood and Black Lace). They then steal another car driven by Riccardo (Cucciolla), who is trying to get a sickly child to a hospital before it’s too late.

The criminals force the man to drive them to their hideout. The film grows incredibly tense as Maria is on the verge of mania as she’s kept under gunpoint the entire way. Somehow, Ricardo remains calm. The heat is on, meaning that both the cops are on their tail and that the city is in the middle of summer. Doc forces the windows up on the car, keeping the nerves inside high.

Maria tries to escape after asking to be allowed to relieve herself outside, which leads to Blade and Thirty-Two capturing her and forcing her to do the act in front of them. It’s due to dogs, wandering the streets and barking, that she is caught (someday I have to do an IMDB list of movies that have dogs randomly wandering the streets).

These are base, horrible men who only know evil acts. After stopping for food and drink, Thirty-Two becomes drunk and attempts to rape Maria, an action that causes other motorists to notice the car. Doc replies by shooting his partner in the neck. The criminal lives, but now cannot move and is even more trapped than everyone else in the car.

The car stops to refill at a small town gas station, where the owner won’t even wait on them until his lunch is up. Doc tries to threaten him, but the old man has a gun at the ready. Blade finally resolves the situation by showing the sick boy inside the car and the old man decides to get back to work. However, a hitchhiker shows up and asks for a ride. As she gets in the car, the old man sees Thirty-Two’s bloody body, but he simply shrugs. It’s not any of his business.

The hitchhiker will not shut up, annoying everyone. When she removes the blanket and reveals Thirty-Two, Blade killing her feels like a relief. Doc asks Riccardo to pull over and they dump the body. And Blade carries out his friend Thirty-Two’s body and finally puts him out of his misery by shooting him.

Finally, they reach the group’s hideout, where Doc has another car and the papers that will allow he and Blade to leave the country. Then he reveals that he planned to kill Riccardo, the child and Maria. Riccardo begs for the boy to live, but Doc refuses and asks him to get him from the car. As Riccardo holds the boy, he pulls the gun he had inside the blanket all along, killing Doc and Blade, whose machine gun burst kills Maria. He takes Doc’s car and money, then leaves, only to reveal that he had been a kidnapper all along, holding the child for ransom. And the boy? Now he’s inside the trunk.

While this film has none of Bava’s trademark magic camerawork, it’s still taunt and well made. For example, in the scene where Doc shoots Thirty-Two, Bava uses tight close-ups of Doc and Riccardo’s faces, as well as the gun that Doc holds, then cuts to black as the car enters a tunnel. In that moment of no light or color at all on the screen — such a contrast to the dynamic hues we expect from the master — we simply hear the report of the gun being fired, stopping Thirty-Two’s rape of Maria. As we return to reality, Blade deals with his rage against Doc by screaming at his friend, only to discover that he is still alive. The flashbacks are relayed to us via voiceover instead of some dramatic camera move. Again — out of character, but this proves that Bava was not all special effects and tricks. He is filming the story as it should be filmed. The action inside the car is claustrophobic. And it had to have been even more so as it was filmed, as there’s real background zooming past behind the actors, so the camera was inside the car.

Also, this is a movie where you notice the acting so much more than in other Bava work. He takes a backseat to the true sense of dread and terror that his actors tell with their performances. I know that I’m a big Eastman fan, but he’s great in this film, a gigantic man child devoted to the id, barely restrained by the adult in the car, Doc.

Following this film, Bava would only work on one more film, 1977’s Shock. He would also do special effects work and uncredited direction on Dario Argento’s Inferno before his death in 1980.

In his later years, Bava left behind many unfilmed ideas. He was about to start filming a science fiction movie called Star Riders with Luigi Cozzi. That movie may have been the much-talked about sequel to Starcrash, which would have starred Caroline Munro and Klaus Kinski as the evil Baron Waak. Munro said of the film at Cannes, “With (her husband) Judd as my comical robot sidekick, El, we have a new mission. To help Baslim, a faithful officer in a dead king’s army, to unravel a mysterious plot of assassination and deceit-and save the life of a beautiful young princess.”

According to this amazing article, Bava had several science fiction films in mind, including the Dardano Sacchetti (The Beyond, A Bay of Blood, The House by the Cemetery, as well as just about every amazing Italian horror movie that is near and dear to your heart) scripted Anomalia, a Lovecraftian script about astronauts who find a wall at the end of the universe that separates good from evil. Holy shit, this is a film screaming to be made. There was also a plan to make The Space Wanderer, based on the Philip José Farmer book Venus on the Half-Shell, that sounds even more insane than that!

Bava believed this was one of his worst films. It wasn’t released in the U.S. until 2001. And yet, I found plenty to like about this murder-filled affair. It also taught me an important lesson: if you invent a new chemical process, don’t go to a rich industrialist’s vacation island.

George Stark is one of those industrialists and he’s invited a bunch of guests to his private island, including Professor Farrell, who has created an industrial resin. Several of the guests want him to sell it. Here’s where the hijinks ensue.

Stark’s wife Jill is sleeping with Farrell’s wife, Trudy (Ira von Fürstenberg, The Fifth Cord). Stark’s partner Nick treats his wife, Marie (Edwige Fenech!) horribly, but allows her to sleep with Charles, one of the servants. Isabelle (Ely Galleani, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin) is a teenage girl along for the ride. And Jack and Peggy just seem to get along, unlike everyone else.

The men beg Farrell for his formula, sending away the only way off the island — a motorboat — away until the deal is done. So when Charles is killed, they simply hang him in the freezer until they can get the radio working to call the mainland. As you do.

Then, teenage Isabelle kills Farrell, but the others only know he’s dead. The killings now pick up, with Peggy being shot to death, Marie being stabbed and Jill being electrocuted in the bathtub. One by one, their bodies are added to the freezer.

With Isabelle having gone missing, Stark, Jack, Nick, and Trudy decide to stay in the same room for the night, as one of them has to be the murderer. Nick takes off after an argument and is found dead the next day, so of course, as is custom, he is also added to the freezer.

Stark has a boat, which makes you think he’d be the suspect. But as he comes back to the house, Jack reveals that he has killed everyone else to steal their checks. He kills Stark and meets with Trudy, who was the real boss. She’s got the resin formula. He has the checks. But they’re both out for themselves and end up killing one another. Isabelle makes herself known and takes everything.

That’s not the whole story. Isabelle also shows up to see Farrell in prison. He didn’t die, but had come up with the whole scheme with Trudy. Turns out he wasn’t the good man that he appeared to be and had stolen the formula. He got Isabelle to be part of his plan, but she gave him a drug that would make him appear to be dead, then pushed him out to the sea. Rescuers found him and he was so messed up on the drug that he confessed. She laughs about the whole thing and leaves the prison, finding it all rather funny that he’ll be hung in the morning while she’ll enjoy three million dollars.

There are better Bava films to be found, but there are plenty of twists and turns in this film. It’s certainly entertaining and you know, Edwige Fenech is in it. So there are way worse movies to spend your time with.

Just remember. If you come up with a great formula or steal one, just keep it to yourself. And don’t go on vacation. Stay at work.

UPDATE: You can watch this for free on Amazon Prime.

There’s an urban legend called The Well to Hell, which claims that you can hear Hell through a hole in the earth, and there have even been audio recordings posted as proof. Those recordings have been revealed to be the soundtrack to this film. That should tell you what you’re getting into.

Peter Kleist arrives from America to take a break and study his family’s history. His uncle Karl allows him to stay at his large mansion and refuses to discuss their ancestor, Baron Otto Bon Kleist, better known as Baron Blood for the torture and murder he inflicted on the village. His foremost crime was burning a witch named Elizabeth Holly at the stake as she cursed him to rise from the dead again and again, knowing no rest, so that she could take her revenge on him over and over again. The Baron’s castle is being remodeled for tourists, so Peter asks his uncle to take him there.

At the castle, Peter meets Eva (Elke Sommer, Lisa and the Devil), who works with Dortmund, a businessman who is fixing the castle. She is there to ensure that Blood’s castle retains its original beauty. Eva comes to Karl’s house for a meal, where we learn that Baron Blood has been seen in the woods near the castle. And Peter has found an ancient spell that will awaken the spirit of the Baron. Karl warns him of dabbling in the occult, and seeing as we’re only a few minutes into the movie, we know he won’t listen.

Of course Peter and Eva go to the bell tower and read the spell at midnight. The bell tolls two, not twelve, symbolic of the time of day that Blood’s victims rose and killed him. Eva begs Peter to reverse the spell, but a gust of wind blows the spell into a fireplace as the Baron emerges from his grave.

The Baron is born with the same wounds he died from, wounds even a doctor cannot heal. He then goes on a killing spree, starting with the doctor and a gravedigger, then hanging Dortmund and smooshing the castle’s caretaker inside a spiked coffin.

The next day, Alfred Becker (Joseph Cotton, The Abominable Dr. Phibes), a disabled millionaire in a wheelchair, purchases the castle. He seems decent, so Eva stays on long enough to have the Baron attack her again. She quits her job and moves to the city, only for the black-clad Baron to follow her, chasing her through the foggy streets in a pure Bava scene. She escapes to Karl’s home and luckily, he finally believes that the Baron is still alive.

A local medium helps them bring back Elizabeth Holly, who gives them a magic amulet and the knowledge that only they can destroy the Baron because Peter and Eva brought him back. The moment they leave, the Baron kills the psychic.

The Baron also chases Karl’s young daughter. She then realizes that the Baron and Becker are the same man, as their eyes burn like fire. When they confront the man who uses a wheelchair with this revelation, he denies it and shows them his castle, which now has dummies impaled on stakes as decorations. As they debate what to do next, he rises from his wheelchair and knocks all of them out, taking them to his torture chamber.

Eva learns that when her Blood and the amulet unite, the Baron’s victims all return from the dead. They rise and tear him apart limb by limb as Peter, Eva and Karl escape. As the film ends, we hear Elizabeth Holly’s laughter.

Critically, this is not considered one of Bava’s best. However, I found plenty to like, including the Baron’s quite frightening design. And how can any movie that features Elke Sommer running through the fog be bad?

Also known as Ecology of Crime, Chain Reaction, Carnage, Twitch of the Death Nerve and Blood Bath, Last House on the Left – Part II and New House on the Left, this is the most violent and nihilistic of all of Mario Bava’s films. It started as a story idea so that Bava could work with Laura Betti (Hatchet for the Honeymoon) again, with the original titles of Stench of Flesh and Thus We Do Live to Be Evil, but had a virtual litany of writers get involved, including producer Giuseppe Zaccariello, Filippo Ottoni, Sergio Canevari, Dardano Sacchetti (who co-wrote all of Fulci’s best films, like Zombi 2 and House by the Cemetery) and Franco Barberi.

Bava was devoted to the film and its low budget meant that he would also be his own cinematographer, often creating innovative tracking shots with a toy wagon and relying on in-camera tricks to make it seem that the location was much more expansive than reality. 

There are thirteen murders in the film — many of which are incredibly gory thanks to the skill of Carlo Rambaldi — occur as several characters in the film vie to inherit the titular bay. The film divides critics and fans, who see it as pure gore versus the nuanced films that Bava is known for. For example, Christopher Lee went on record stating that he found the movie to be revolting.

It also gave rise to the slasher genre, as every film that follows owes it a debt of gory gratitude. And some owe it plenty more, in particular, Friday the 13th Part 2, which copies two of the kills in this film shot for shot.

The story is all over the place and has a mix of dark humor and pure meanness at its core, starting with Filippo Dontai strangling his wife, Countess Federica, before being stabbed and killed scant seconds later. His corpse is dragged to the bay, where his murder goes undiscovered as detectives begin their investigation into the death of the Countess.

That’s when we meet Frank (Chris Avram, Enter the Devil), a real estate agent, and his girlfriend Laura, who plot on taking over the bay. They were working with Donati to kill his wife and now need his signature, but don’t realize that he was killed.

Meanwhile, four teenagers hear about the murders and break into the mansion. One of them, Brunhilda, skinny dips in the bay until the dead corpse of Donati surfaces and touches her. She screams and runs toward the mansion, only to be killed by an unseen murderer holding a billhook. That killer uses that same weapon to kill her boyfriend, Bobby, then he impales Duke and Denise together with a spear while they’re having sex. Here’s a good lesson that I always yell: don’t fuck in the woods, don’t fuck in a haunted house, don’t fuck when a killer is about.

The killer ends up being the Countess’ illegitimate son, Simon, who is wiping everyone out under the orders of Frank. Renata (Claudine Auger, Thunderball) shows up to throw a wrench in the work, as she’s the Countess’ real daughter. Along with her husband Albert, she begins to make plans to kill her half-brother.

What follows is a near Grand Guignol of back and forth murder: Frank attacks Renata, who turns the tables and stabs him with a knife. Paolo, the entomologist who lives on the estate grounds, sees the killing but is strangled by Albert before he can call the police and his wife is decapitated with an axe. Laura shows up, but Simon strangles her to death before Albert kills him. Frank shows up again, but Albert takes him out, leaving Renata as the sole heir.

They return home to await being awarded the money, but as they get to the front door, their children shoot them with a shotgun, thinking they are playing with their parents. Bored with the game and how long their parents are playing dead, the kids run out to play another game in an ending that can either be viewed as pure comedy or a sad comment on humanity. Maybe both.

Bay of Blood isn’t the art of past Bava films, but it’s not trash. It’s also been claimed to have been Bava’s favorite film that he directed. And Dario Argento adores the movie so much that he literally stole a print of it from a theater!

You don’t have to resort to larceny. You can just watch this on Shudder.

By the late 60’s, a series of commercial failures caused Mario Bava to lose his deal with American International Pictures, but the successes of Twitch of the Death Nerve and Baron Blood turned his fortunes around. Now, he was allowed to make movies without studio interference.

Bava was allowed to create Lisa and the Devil as a non-commercial film, but it flopped in Italy and the U.S., where it would be retitled House of Exorcism with twenty minutes of the film cut and a new scene with Elke Sommer and Robert Alda would rip off The Exorcist. Producer Alfredo Leone wanted this new footage to have profanity and strong sexual content, which Bava refused to do. He even tried to get Sommer to not be in these scenes and dropped out of the film. The re-edited (that’s being really fair to what is a hack job) version also flopped. For a much more in-depth telling of this story, please visit Groovy Doom.

So what is Lisa and the Devil about? Well, Lisa is a tourist who wanders away from a guided group tour to explore an antique store where Leandro (Telly Savalas, who if you ever get the chance to visit Pittsburgh, is featured in an epic photo in the Hollywood Bowl area of the famed Arsenal Lanes bowling alley) is purchasing a dummy. She looks at the man — who looks just like a demon she saw in a fresco — and runs. She then meets a mustache wearing man who recognizes her, but she bumps him into falling down the stairs to his death (or maybe not).

Lisa can’t find her way back to her tour, so she follows a couple and their driver (who is secretly dating the wife), but they break down at a mansion where Leandro coincidentally  (or maybe not) works as a butler for the blind Countess and her son Maximilian, who begs his mother to let them stay.

The mustache man may (or maybe not) still be alive, as he stalks Lisa. There’s also a mystery guest in the mansion who may be a prisoner and Lisa may (or maybe not) be Elena, Maximilian’s long-lost lover. And oh yeah, the mustache guy is really Carlos, the Countesses second husband and Elena or Lisa (or maybe not) was sleeping with him.

This next part needs some careful wordsmithing. Carlos — that’s mustache man’s name — is being prepared for burial by Leandro while still being alive. Lisa freaks out as he tries to take her away from the mansion, but he’s killed by Maximilian, but then he’s not even real, but the dummy Leandro bought at the start of the movie.

If that made you say, “What the fuck?” then get ready. The young driver loverboy is killed while fixing the car, but Leandro offers to cover it all up if he can take care of the body. The husband demands that his wife leave with him, so she runs him over with the car. Then, she is murdered by Maximilian. Whew.

Lisa is knocked out by all of this and Leandro dresses her like Elena. Turns out he is a demon indebted to the Countess and Maximilian and forced to help them play out their lives again and again and again, using dummies to represent each of them. As Lisa arrived and interrupted his shopping for new dummies, her real form must now become Elena. But wait? Isn’t Lisa Elena? That’s what Maximilian thinks, as he takes her to the secret room, where we learn that Elena’s corpse and ghost are the mystery guest. He drugs Lisa and starts to rape her when the ghost laughs at him, causing him to stop and tell his mother what he has done: he killed Carlos for betraying his mother by sleeping with Elena, but imprisoned her rather than letting her get away. When his mother tells him the only next logical step is to kill Lisa, he kills her instead.

He then finds every dead person all gathered at a table for dinner. His mother tries to kill him, so he jumped out a window and is impaled on a fence. Leandro appears behind the dead bodies.

Lisa escapes, but not before she sees Leandro refuse to accept a doll of her. On an amazing 1960’s plane, complete with spiral staircase, she discovers that the entire plane is empty, except for the pilot — Leandro. She collapses and becomes the dummy that he carries back to the house.

Lisa and the Devil was Bava’s dream project turned nightmare. The end result — which didn’t play in wide release in the director’s lifetime — is a waking dream of doom, dread and predestined death. I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re looking for a straight narrative, but it’s a strong film for those seeking to explore and be mesmerized.

UPDATE: You watch this for free on Amazon Prime.