FATHER MICHAEL (Robert Alda) must rid the hospitalized Lisa Reiner (Elke Sommer) of Satanic influence in THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM.
N ENTIRE YEAR passed without takers for Lisa and the Devil. With allegedly more than $1,000,000 of his own money sunk into this
accursed, carte blanche white elephant, Alfredo Leone decided that something had to be done to lend it some boxoffice gunpowder. The course of least resistance was obvious: Leone had in his hands a very high-qual- ity picture involving the Devil at a time when the hot- test film in the world was about demonic possession: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). In fact, the William Peter Blatty novel upon which the Friedkin film was based had been dogging Leone peripherally for some time. During the filming of Lisa and the Devil, Elke Sommer’s husband Joe Hyams happened to mention it.