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<font size="4"><br>The Cinema of Mario Bava</font>
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<br>DVD review Gary Johnson</font>
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<p><font size="6" color="#FF0000"><b>W</b></font>hile Italian director Mario Bava is now widely regarded as one of the great directors of horror cinema, his movies were seldom treated with much respect in America upon their initial theatrical release. Distributors frequently redubbed and recut his movies, removing large sections and rearranging entire sequences. <i>Lisa and the Devil</i> (1973), for example, never found a distributor until producer Alfredo Leone supervised the filming of a new storyline that imitated <i>The Exorcist</i> and featured characters not part of the original movie. The three main sequences of the omnibus shocker <i>Black Sabbath</i> (1963; original Italian title: <i>I Tre Volte della Paura</i>; English translation: <i>The Three Faces of Fear</i>) were reshuffled and intimations of lesbianism were removed. <i>Shock</i> (1977) was retitled <i>Beyond the Door II</i> to form a bogus alignment with Ovidio Assonitis's <i>Chi Sei?</i> (1974; American release title <i>Beyond the Door</i>). And <i>The Girl Who Knew Too Much</i> (1963) was retitled with the more horrific <i>The Evil Eye</i> and re-edited to include comedic material not used in the European release print.
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