L’ESORCICCIO (1975)
aka The Exorcist: Italian Style

Article 3565 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-26-2011
Posting Date: 5-19-2011
Directed by Ciccio Ingrassia
Featuring Ciccio Ingrassia, Lino Banfi, Didi Perego
Country: Italy
What it is: EXORCIST parody

When his son is possessed by an evil spirit as the result of a talisman, the mayor of a small Italian village calls on a local con man posing as an exorcist to exorcise him.

The copy I found of this one was in unsubtitled Italian, so I can’t exactly say I understood all the subtleties of the story; some of the details of the plot description I got from other sources. However, it’s really not that horribly difficult to follow, and it uses visuals to tell things quite a bit. It does confirm one of my suspicions, and that is that I’ve long believed that the team of Franco and Ciccio would have been improved by one simple adjustment – remove Franco. This movie, without Franco but with Ciccio (one of the only two he directed as well) is much easier to put up with. During the course of the story, several people get possessed; the most direct parodies of THE EXORCIST occur when the teenage daughter gets possessed. It seems to get weirder and sillier as it goes along, and it gets a lot of its laughs with the running gag of levitating furniture. Not bad for a movie I couldn’t really understand, and, for my money, it’s also one of the better Italian takes on THE EXORCIST.