Naughty
nuns: the appeal is obvious. Cloaked in the magnetic mystery of her thick twill
tunic, the solid walls of the cloister, and the impenetrability of her
spirituality, the nun is a walking embodiment of the original injunction against
looking. This regulated interiority has made of the nun a potent figure of
fantasy from the earliest days of organized Christianity, and on into the
present day. What better medium could there be for plumbing her tantalizing
depths than film—an all-seeing eye whose very nature is to reveal, and to
capture in the visible world the signs of the ineffable?
The
family-friendly cinematic investigations of these dark and devoted corners
finds its most wholesome expression in the reverence of Henry King’s The Song
of Bernadette (1943) or the moral righteousness of Robert Wise’s The Sound of
Music (1965), Haylee Mills’ innocent insouciance in The Trouble with Angels
(1966), or even Whoopi Goldberg’s pop-music posturing in the 1992 summer
blockbuster Sister Act. But the underside of the veil has produced a plethora
of dirty books and lascivious pictures as well—after all, the more unspoilt the
bride of Christ, the greater the temptation to explore her uncharted
territories, a sort of violent male manifest destiny capable of the most
deliciously sinful proportions. (It’s worth noting that a little ditty called
The Nun’s Story is thought to be the first stag film with a cum shot; efforts
to find much information about this particular film are complicated by another with
the same title, released in the same decade, starring none other than the
incorruptible Audrey Hepburn.) On the silver screen, this trend found
particular popularity in the 1970s and 1980s in the rich and raunchy sub genre
known most euphoniously as nunsploitation.
The
origin of the subgenre is generally mapped to the success of Ken Russell’s 1971
still-censored masterpiece, The Devils. Though Eriprando Visconti’s The Nun of
Monza—based on the true story of Sister Virginia Maria, who bore two children fathered
by a local aristocrat in the 17th century—premiered in 1969, for one example,
The Devils’ much-publicized “X” rating and high-art bonafides (the cast, a best
director win at the Venice Film Festival, the Aldous Huxley source material, et
cetera), as well as its box office success (grossing nearly $11 million
worldwide) most effectively ignited the exploitation flame.
In line
both narratively and tonally with the 1952 Huxley book The Devils of Loudon: A
True Story of Demonic Possession, Russells’ film follows the perils of pride
and popularity for the handsome priest Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), whose
career overlapped with the growing threat of Protestantism to the Catholic
church’s political dominance in 17th century-France. A well-known seducer of
various important men's daughters, Grandier was the unwitting object of the
local Abbess’ obsessive affections; suffering from severe scoliosis and an even
more severe horniness, Sister Joan of the Angels (Vanessa Redgrave) conspires
with the convent’s confessor and her ever-thirsty sisters to prove that
Grandier consorted with the devil and bewitched the innocent nuns. In a bid for
control of Loudon and at the behest of the Cardinal and the King, Grandier’s
inquisitors eventually find him guilty and sentence him to burn at the
stake—but not before the sadistic exorcist Father Pierre Barre comes to town,
applying rituals, relics, and enemas with abandon, unleashing in the process a
frenzied performance of erotically-tinged possession from the cloistered collective.
“There
are performing nude Lesbians, spikes driven through tongues, castrations,
closeup of a man burning to death, flagellations with spiked chains, vomiting
and other unspeakable acts too ghastly to look at, much less write about,”
wrote Rex Reed in the New York Daily News, August 10, 1971; it took him over
three weeks from the film’s premiere at The Fine Arts cinema to muster the
fortitude to describe The Devils’ many delights. After moving to the Little
Carnegie theater on October 1, this “freak show in an insane asylum that looks
like the inside of the Holland Tunnel” opened wide, including at the 42nd
Street Apollo, exposing its deliciously controversial goods to the Deuce’s
international and arthouse-hungry denizens.
The
nun’s inherent potential for exploitation, as hinted above, and the financial
incentive and blasphemous possibilities suggested by The Devils’ notoriety,
provide the general backdrop for the proliferation of nunsploitation films.
What also ties many of the nunsploitation titles together is the platform such
stories represent for political statements (or the posture thereof), generally
regarding the hypocrisy of the church or, as with the earlier and very similar
“women in prison” subgenre, institutional corruption, the abuse of bio-power,
and sexual repression; to the erotic and sado-masochistic possibilities
presented by caged birds, tales of twisted sisters add a far more constrictive
uniform and the constantly caressed Christ on the cross. Russell set a potent
example for this “hidden” interest in seductively speaking truth to power; at
the center of both his and Huxley’s interpretation is the tragedy of the
free-spirited, undeniably charismatic Urbain Grandier’s destruction at the
hands of the Church hierarchy for the purpose of political expediency and
increased geographical control.
But lest
we do her any injustice, it should be recalled that the nuns of Loudun’s
blasphemous behavior first transpired through the sympathetic magic conjured by
one hunchbacked Prioress’ unrequited desires. Disappointed by her favored
lover’s utter lack of interest (as Huxley notes with characteristic shade,
Grandier barely knew Sister Joan existed), the Mother Superior seeks—and, to
some degree, achieves—her revenge through the conjuring of diabolical spirits
and the display of just the sort of intimate, ecstatic visions as those
described by St. Teresa of Ávila, Carmelite nun, Catholic reformer, and example
par excellence of the erotic power of women's extreme religiosity. Her story,
one man’s artistic exploitation of it, and the revolutionary potential that
seeps around the edges is the model for the forthcoming exploration of what the
feminine audience might reclaim from a most-misogynist film genre, created to
dampen men’s palms in the dingy corners of the grindhouse.
“I saw in his hand a long spear of gold...
He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my
very entrails... The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so
surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to
be rid of it.”
So reads
St. Teresa of Avila’s mid-16th-century description of her ecstatic encounter
with a seraph, one of the foundational experiences in her mystical development
from fairly anonymous sinner to adored saint. The narration of such singular
experiences of transcendence serve throughout Catholic history as one of the
few modes by which a nun might establish her interiority as part of the
exterior world. By expanding the boundaries of her existence—beyond the
stratified layers of wool of her habit, the stone walls of the convent, the
barriers of her mortal flesh—St. Teresa insists upon her own
multi-dimensionality and, in effect, resists the Church’s imposition of
objectification.
Such
expressions of independent transcendence represented a significant threat to
the religious orthodoxy of the day. First, any such mystical vision endowed
upon a lowly transgressor circumvented the established hierarchy of the
Church—the very source of a whole slew of boring, often shockingly greedy and
evil men's power and on which the persistence of heterodoxy and its many
landholdings relied. And second, that women in particular were defined as the
weaker of the sexes by that same orthodoxy, more prone to suggestion and
diabolical obsession, and therefore completely unworthy of such direct
communication. That God, the biggest boy, should privately converse with, let’s
face it, a spinster, and directly, and in a fashion intoxicating to herself,
her sisters, and the surrounding populace—!
The
public’s fascination with tales of mystical visions and supernatural
visitations lay as much in their controversial nature as in the aspirational
models and inspirational teachings they offered. Was the source heavenly or
demonic, and could a nun be trusted to judge the difference? A certain humility
in the face of this otherworldly intervention was required of the rapturous—no
mere nun could insist upon her own knowledge or ability to recognize the
transcendent. Parishioners’ unending fascination with these tales, rife with
the potent push and pull of the taboo, was generally reigned in by sanctioned
interpreters. St. Teresa, for example, was canonized just forty years after her
death, thereby corralling the spicy power of her frankly horny interventions.
But the
puerile power of her visions persists: a mere century or so after St. Teresa’s
first assignations with her supernatural bridegroom, the Italian artist Gian
Lorenzo Bernini revivified the mystery with his portrayal of the penetrating
instance above in a commissioned work for the Cornaro Chapel in Rome. Simply
representing the ecstasy described would likely titillate, to be sure, but his
creative interventions make clear his vaguely heretical intent. Milky white
marble cascades in labial folds beyond the perimeter of the shrine, her spread
legs draped loosely over the side of the cloud supporting her swooning form;
her veil, disheveled; her neck arched, head back; her lips parted, two fingers
pressed suggestively together; and her feet—mon dieu!—revealed and bare.
Here
enacted is the truly taboo nature of the nun revealed: from a rebellious
enunciation of transcendent ecstasy, to a man creating a dirty picture of it,
and the spark of feminine power that remains. All of which is outlined to
insist that simply because a male artist and probable foot-fetishist may, with
his X-rated interpretation, seemingly re-encase a woman both in her terrestrial
body and the holy walls of her wimple; but in manifesting the erotic potential of
her unruly utterance, perhaps the artwork re-instantiates the revolutionary
power of her disobedient act. In the selection of nunsploitation films that
follow, nuns lust, fuck, and kill, committing sins of self-expression that
while certainly intended to please men, resist the confines of their cloistered
existence—in the convent, and on the silver screen.
The
1970s saw legendary Japanese production company Nikkatsu struggling to compete
with television; in an effort to provide what home entertainment couldn’t, they
initiated the softcore "Roman Porno" line, and with it a truly unique
approach to the nunsploitation film. That Japan’s earliest major film studio
should have taken up the soiled veil is somewhat notable; Catholics were a
historically persecuted minority in Japan, and the battles of good vs. evil,
chastity vs. temptation, heaven-sent vs. hell-borne that inflame the cultural
commentary of European, Mexican, and other nunsploitation titles would
presumably carry less of a potent punch in the country’s more secular 1970s
context. But the political potential of the subgenre may have been the source
of its appeal; according to Jasper Sharp, in his extensively illustrated Behind
the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, “Arguably, what
Roman Porno brought to Japanese cinema was the somewhat progressive portrayal
of strong female characters, powerful sexual beings in their own right and not
just one-dimensional ciphers used to express anti-authoritarian sentiments or
to vent one’s spleen against society.” The alignment with the missionary
pattern set by The Devils is apparent.
Japan’s
incursion into the nunsploitation genre found its first and best-known
expression in 1974’s School of the Holy Beast. Directed by Norifumi Suzuki for
Toei’s pinku line, it preceded many of the European nunsploitation titles and
incorporated a number of stylistic touches borrowed from the then-young but
already influential oeuvre of Dario Argento (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
and Four Flies on Gray Velvet, to name two; its closest aesthetic cousin
Suspira premiered three years later). Though its pleasures are many, the
Nikkatsu films that followed, beginning with their titles—Catholic Nun Lucia:
Disgraced (1978), Catholic Nun: Wet Rope Confession (1979), Aching within Black
Robes (1980), Catholic Nun Rope Hell (1984), and the film explored further
here, Masaru Konuma’s Cloistered Nun: Runa’s Confession (1976)—are in some ways
stranger and, in their particularly thread-bare and convoluted plot devices and
story structures, equally delightful.
Starring
Runa Takamura, member of the J-pop band Golden Half (seen performing in the
nightclub in Yasuharu Hasebe’s Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter) until its disbanding
in 1974, Cloistered Nun was the first of two Roman Porno films featuring the
erstwhile pop singer to premiere within three months, the second similarly
titled Runa’s Confession: The Men Who Flocked Around Me. The film opens with
Runa being accosted in the bell tower by a priest, who pays no mind to her
otherwise-inviolable habit nor the incessant bell-ringing that persist
throughout the opening credits. We learn through erotic flashbacks that Runa
absconded to the convent after discovering her boyfriend, Keigo, and sister,
Mayumi, in bed together; while there, she is assaulted in various pastoral
settings by the aforementioned priest—scenes witnessed by Runa’s fellow
nun/lover, Yuki, who uses these violent encounters and various alter
accoutrement for foreplay. Runa has returned home to offer Keigo and Mayumi a
real estate deal in which Runa and the priest will act as go-betweens for the
urban couple and the Church. Incidentally, to raise money for the purchase,
Mayumi wields her calligraphy brush and ink to make pussy prints to con various
adoring men around town, a scheme that will eventually result in an extended
gang bang on a Tokyo Drifter-reminiscent television soundstage.
Between
the symbol-heavy, carefully-filmed sex scenes, in which, for example, the
flames of a fireplace tastefully withhold the revelation of penetration or a
train is seen entering a station (really!) in the window behind a couple
fucking on a pool table, the potential for political commentary playfully pokes
its head. The Church’s blind-eye to its priest’s dastardly doings and involvement
in shady real estate schemes, and the corrupting influence of sex and greed on
Runa’s sister and brother-in-law, face righteous revenge from Runa, who’s
manipulated and seduced the perpetrator-victims into providing her with the
financial means to escape with her lesbian lover to Australia—all with wimple
and veil willfully intact. Runa finally leaves her holy vestments behind as she
boards the ship bearing her away to sexual freedom; the final image is her
smiling face pressed against the window as she’s taken from behind by a random
man she and Yuki met portside, and a celebratory plume of cum-like waves fills
the screen.
Wits and
seduction are Runa’s tools for a revenge most sensual against the various
heterosexual, heretical parties that have wronged her, but her romance with
another nun gives another trope of the nunsploitation and women-in-prison
subgenres a revolutionary kick—a trope with potent historical precedent in the
context of the nun’s rebellious act of self-expression and self-determination.
In her
pioneering 1985 collection of first-person testimony, Lesbian Nuns: Breaking
Silence, Rosemary Keefe Curb writes, “Both nuns and Lesbians are emotionally
inaccessible to male coercion…. A male-defined culture which moralizes about
'sins of the flesh' and the pollution and evil of women's carnal desires sees
both nuns and Lesbians as 'unnatural' but at opposite poles on a scale of
female virtue.” The ambivalence inherent in the religious taboo finds one of
its most piquant expressions in the rampant lesbianism within the convent’s
thus-tainted walls, attested to by the frequent presence of said activity in
nunsploitation films. Recreated for men’s titillation, the combination of the
double-denial of the untouchable nun and the unreachable lesbian, with the
voyeuristic revelations of the hidden contours and fondlings of these
sex-addled sisters, gave any number of nunsploitation titles their potent and
lasting popularity.
If the
revelation of mystical visions and interactions with supernatural beings
allowed St. Teresa the means of overcoming the social strictures of her time
through personal expression and the transcendence of the various physical
boundaries imposed by God and man, the further desecration of fleshly barriers
represented by the sexual encounter between two women heightens the
revolutionary impact and amplifies the offending nun’s rebellious utterance.
Though impregnated nuns and other instances of heterosexual mingling between
the laity and the veil are actually quite common in the historical record,
Judith C. Brown’s Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance
Italy, published in 1986, tracks the author’s discovery of a singular report of
same-sex coupling in a 16th-century Italian convent: that of Sister Benedetta Carlini
and Bartolomea, whose story is the inspiration for Paul Verhoeven’s upcoming
release, Benedetta.
Scholars
have posited that referring to Benedetta and Bartolomea as lesbians is to
anachronistically apply a contemporary designation to what was, in the 1500s,
perhaps something less tied to a fixed identity or sexual preference, but
rather another instantiation of the Abbess’ unbounded religiosity—another
performance of her mystical transcendence of the dictates of her environment.
For the two young women at the center of Juan López Moctezuma’s Alucarda, love
is part and parcel to the supernatural which, through the film itself, becomes
its own gory reality.
A
popular radio and television show producer and host in 1960s Mexico, López
Moctezuma first broke into filmmaking via his friendship with Alejandro
Jodorowsky; the two met amidst Mexico’s avant-garde theater scene, and López
Moctezuma would serve as co-producer on two of Jodorowsky’s early films—Fando y
Lis and El Topo—before parlaying this respected connection into a filmmaking
career of his own. Alucarda, la hija de las tinieblas (“The Daughter of
Darkness”) premiered in France in 1977 as part of the Paris Festival of
Fantastic Films, and like López Moctezuma’s other works, combines an art cinema
sensibility with gothic themes for an approach to horror intended to stand
apart from the Mexican genre films that most recently preceded it, and
reflective of the cultural shifts taking place in Mexico at the time.
The
film’s cold open introduces us to a constructed world of only
vaguely-referential symbols and a pervading sense of the ominous: an unknown
woman gives birth in a cobweb-covered crypt; presumably after a number of
years, the voluminously coiffed Justine arrives at a convent whose denizens are
dressed in strange, mummy wrap-like habits, and meets fellow orphan Alucarda
when the funereal girl emerges from the shadows of their new cell. Left by the
nuns to their own devices, the two young lovers escape into the woods, where
they meet a hunchbacked purveyor of magical talismans and the haunted,
desiccated corpse of none other than Lucy Westenra, the first English victim of
Dracula (read: the title, backwards). Before long, they are exchanging oaths
before Satan, screaming and writhing in hysteric fits, and subjected to the
violence of a blood-soaked exorcism—and the equally ineffective ministrations
of modern medicine.
From the
sisters’ bizarre habits, to the playful paganism of the girls’ secret games, to
the Victorian-era evil they encounter, the film presents a world shaped by the
hormonally heightened inner workings of its horny heroines, whose intimacy
separates them from the convent’s Catholicism and makes of their dreams a
shared, sinister reality. Capable of inspiring a Devils-reminiscent level of
pandemonium in the convent, Justine and Alucarda’s relationship serves to
overturn the hierarchy of reality and fantasy, modernity and medieval
superstition, life and death; as the devil himself (in the form of his
misshapen emissary) tells them, “You shall blend into each other,” anointing
their sexual encounter with a mystical power capable of literally bringing down
the convent’s walls. Though the moral quality of their visions is never in
question (there is, after all, a giant goat here), the division between what is
“real” amongst the film’s mise en scène and what is the product of the
collision of the girls’ flights of sinful fancy with the potent credulity of
the good Christians around them is hazy at best; in the tantalizing tradition
of the religious taboo, the lines separating attraction and repulsion are made
liminal.
The
film’s confirmation of its plucky protagonists’ supernatural encounters—through
the visible presence of a levitating nun, a fire-lit orgy in the woods, or
Justine’s vengeful return from the dead—makes their romantic renunciation of
Catholic rules revolutionary. The same claim can be made for a West
German-Swiss co-production premiering in the same year: Jesús Franco’s Love
Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1977). With a script by producer Erwin Dietrich
and a more substantial budget than many of Franco’s works, Love Letters sits
prettily amidst a string of women in prison films in the prolific filmmaker’s
output as a spirited condemnation of the Catholic church that only Franco could
make.
Love
Letters follows the trajectory of the standard nunsploitation film as
established by the subgenre’s literary foundations and, in its less erotic
elements, historic precedent. A beautiful God-fearing girl is caught necking
with her fiancé in the woods and sent, unwillingly, to a convent, for spiritual
correction and indefinite imprisonment. There she encounters sadistic
persecution and hypocrisy without limits, and despite pleas to various parties
in often-unsent letters, she is unable to escape the bounds of the cruel Mother
Superior’s control. Love Letters is full of the Franco flourishes fans lust
for, from a priest masturbating in the confessional, to close-ups on paintings
of saints cavorting with the devil, to a whole lotta bush and bright-red
blood—but there are other treats to delight even those less partial to the
master’s work.
In said
confession, the ill-fated Christian femme innocente Maria regales the panting
priest with memories of blow-jobs and dirty dreams; after being caught
sensually sharing an apple with two of her kinky sisters, Maria is forced to
don a girdle of thorns and in the resulting feverish state, imaginatively
reenacts many of the previously described recollections. These sensual
encounters blend into scenes of the evil Abbess attempting to give birth to
Satan’s son, suggesting that the lines of reality and sex-tinged nightmare are
blurred. Lest Maria’s sanctity come into doubt, the film quickly establishes
that yes, actually, the priest and sisters are Satan worshippers; yes, they are
attempting to make Maria the mother of the antichrist; and yes, the devil wears
a red onesie, goatee, and cute little horns. And to round out this delightful
portrait of Catholicism gone thoroughly awry, Maria is handed over to the Holy
Inquisition, swiftly found guilty of frolicking with the fiend, and sentenced
to burn at the stake.
A
conglomeration of Diderot’s La religieuse (source material for Jacques
Rivette’s 1966 film, for one), Rosemary’s Baby, and, among others, The Devils
(the latter most prominently during Maria’s rape by the devil, as the watching
nuns writhe and lick crucifixes in thin-eyebrowed, bare-breasted homage), there
is actually little of the eponymous text to be found in the film. Published
anonymously in 1669, Letters of a Portuguese Nun was a literary sensation. A
collection of five romantic missives from a love-struck nun to the unnamed
French soldier who’d abandoned her following a short affair, the book was
believed by its initial fans to be the work of the real-life Sister Mariana
Alcoforado. Eventually the “novel” was ascribed to minor diplomat Gabriel de
Guilleragues, though their authorship remains an item of heated debate—despite,
it is worth noting, these rather conclusive words from none other than Jean-Jacques
Rousseau: “Women know neither how to describe nor experience love itself… I
would bet everything I have that the Portuguese Letters were written by a man.”
(Interestingly, one of the writers to weigh in on the controversy was actress
Myriam Cyr, who is best known for her turn as Claire Clairmont in Ken Russell’s
Gothic.)
Ironically,
Sister Maria effectively saves her own life by writing a letter to God on the
eve of her execution—perfect eye makeup intact—and dropping it from the window,
where it is discovered by the Prince of Portugal, a critic of the Church who
delightedly intercedes on her behalf. Should the Inquisition appear charitably
able to truly rethink its error, they immediately change course and chase down
the priest and Mother Superior on only the Prince’s hearsay-so. All those in
charge are ready and willing to dispatch enemies imagined or “real,” and the
one God-fearing nun and vaguely repentant sinner comes out, in the end, on top.
Unfortunately,
such a position is rarely afforded the naughty nun, whose persecutors tend to
prefer missionary or doggy-style, and often cleanse their sinful souls by
torturing her and, eventually, removing her from this earthly coil. Such is the
case with director Gilberto Martínez Solares, whose 1975 Mexican nunsploitation
classic Satanico Pandemonium: La Sexorcista concludes with a funeral for poor
Sister Maria (another one)—but not before she wrecks a shocking amount of havoc
on the convent, its helpless neighbors, and the very sanctity of the sisterhood.
An
extraordinarily prolific filmmaker throughout Mexican cinema’s Golden Age,
Martínez Solares had directed nearly 100 films before Satanico Pandemonium came
into his hands, and would go on to direct another 30 before his death. Best
known for comedies, a selection of Santo films, and a number of vehicles for
comedian Germán Valdés (aka “Tin Tan”), he came to direct Satanico after his
son Adolfo Martínez Solares was approached by producer Jorge Barragán, who’d
secured funding but wasn’t able to complete a script; Martínez Solares, Jr., a
filmmaker in his own right, agreed to handle the screenplay, as long as his
father could direct. The resulting film is hardly the tentative or
faint-hearted effort of an old-school laugh-hound; for one, per the son’s recollections,
Satanico’s cast includes a number of “high-class” sex workers, and the rather
downbeat ending was added in order to appease Mexican censors, who would only
allow the preceding blasphemy if it were thoroughly disavowed.
We meet
Sister Maria—picture of perfection, adored by the pious and the peasantry
alike—collecting wildflowers in a sun-filled glen, until she’s rudely
interrupted by a naked, beastly man who pursues her with the symbol of symbols:
a shiny red apple. Maria refuses, and attempts to ward off his temptations with
fervent prayer and a hot bit of bare-chested self-flagellation. By nightfall,
however, she’s succumbing to a fellow nun’s aggressive sexual advances—and so
her degradation begins, and advances with a by turns glee-filled and
guilt-ridden abandon befitting the intensity of her previous holiness. Her
sexual appetites encompass her fellow novitiates and young Marcello, a peasant
boy, whose refusal earns him and his grandmother a blood-soaked, fiery death;
and they’re not the only mortal victims of Maria’s passions—she assists another
nun to commit suicide and even strangles the mother superior in a luxurious fit
of rage. As her sins escalate and a revelation (and inquisition) draws near,
the demon returns to give Maria a choice: a slow, torturous but surely
rectifying death at the hands of the church, or the chance to replace the
erstwhile abbess in a thoroughly debauched convent. Our ever-horny heroine
elects the latter, and is rewarded with a delectable vision of nuns run absolutely
wild.
Cut to a
decidedly more somber scene, as the nuns congregate outside Maria’s door; alas,
she’s expired at the hands of the plague, and the preceding pandemonium was
just a delirious dream, an illicit “Incident at Owl Creek Bridge”/Lost Highway-style
fantasy of a fever-addled brain. But a fantasy it was, and censorship be
damned—the world hidden beneath a supremely pious nun’s habit is revealed to be
one of unparalleled sin. Huxley wrote of the Loudon sisters, “...life in a
seventeenth-century convent was merely a succession of boredoms and
frustrations,” and thus a cage capable of inspiring the most bizarre behavior
of its righteous denizens, should they be left to their own devious devices; in
Satanico Pandemonium, the unbearability of a saintly death is both the excuse
for and the tidy button-up of a very sexy and otherwise unruly tale.
To quote
the prefatory remarks of Sister Benedetta’s inquisitors’ condemnatory report:
“...all novelty is dangerous and all unusual events are suspect.” Such was the
attitude of the establishment toward mystical visions and miraculous happenings
as narrated by otherwise-silenced nuns; such is also a predictable response to
the passions, predilections, and power revealed to underlie the “immodest acts”
depicted in the films described above. What lies beneath the nun’s
tantalizingly unyielding habit remains a fantasy, but one that is available for
interpretation—in whatever way turns you on.
The
Deuce Notebook: Sister Acts : A dark and
deep dive into the secretive, sexual and seductive world of Nunsploitation. By
Madelyn Sutton. MUBI, September 28, 2021.
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