⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
My Italian dream team of Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso tackle the combined genres of Satanism and nunsploitation with their usual trash-tinged and brain-damaged vibe. We start strong with a young nun wandering lost through the catacombs of her convent. Looking more like a torture dungeon than a place of God, the young lady grows frantic as she passes hundreds of skulls and a glowing-eyed something that is rocking back and forth in a chair for some reason. It’s too dark to really tell what’s going on. Finally, she comes across the corpse of one of her sisters lying on a slab, naked except for a towel covering her naughty bits and her habit. I guess, even in death, the habit stays on. The convent embalmer, Sister Assunta, enters into frame and yells at the poor, scared girl. She goes on to let her know she has to purify the dead nun which she does by cutting out her genitals and going off on a tangent about the vagina being the door to evil. So far, so modern day conservative Catholic. Assunta is obviously fucking insane and she hammers this point home by stabbing the lost nun to death after explaining about the Devil impregnating a nun, an abortion and the Devil’s spawn still living in the convent. The glowing eyed cheap-ass paper maché Satan head pops up and that leads to the stabbing. Between this, we’ve seen Mother Superior (my favorite spaghetti nutbar Franca Stoppi) exchanging longing looks with the convent gardener (Hell of the Living Dead’s Franco Garofalo). Or, it’s possible she’s just constipated and he’s just horny. The respected Father Inardo arrives shortly after the two nuns die (the embalmer perishes immediately after slaughtering her sister in Christ) to look into the supposed evil and exorcise it out of the place. His findings are disturbing and when he reports it to his superiors they hand the case off to another man of the cloth, Father Valerio (Carlo De Mejo who you probably know from City of the Living Dead amongst other Italian splatter flicks). Not long after his arrival, Inardo is immolated when The Devil performs the most brutal “Knock Knock” joke ever told. “Who’s there?” “THE DEVIL!” and Inardo goes up in flames. Anyways, a dead padre, talk of the Devil and supposedly supernatural murders within the flock get playful Father Valerio investigating. He’s sure of a rational explanation (his belief is that “The Devil” exists purely in the mind) and he’s kind of right in that the biblical idea of the Devil doesn’t have much to do with it but to call anything happening in this convent “rational” is a completely foolish act. A nasty case of stigmata, a lazy case of possession, an attic full of child mannequins hanging from the ceiling, rotting corpses, a boiled baby (don’t fret, the noticeable doll prop makes it way more hilarious than unsettling), inevitable maggots, animal cruelty (what, you thought you were safe because this wasn’t the jungle?), a tape recorder that magically and suddenly plays video (yes, it lazily makes sense in the end when the ESP angle is half-ass’d into things and it does answer all of our hero’s questions… not that it saves him from a knife to the thigh), last-minute zombies, last-second alchemy and a big ol’ secret concerning Mother Superior and her naughty loins are all in the mix. Undeniably stupid (that ending is just beyond what anyone with a normal functioning brain would expect) but Mattei is gonna Mattei and I love the man for the amount of Mattei he brings to everything.
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