Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Satanico Pandemonium

This is a much better nunsploitation effort than the lamentable The Other Hell was, but I think I may have to face the sad fact that, School of the Holy Beast aside, the nunsploitation genre is doomed to never live up to its glorious potential.

The film follows Sister Maria, a devout nun at a convent who becomes ensnared by Satan and begins having constant forbidden sexual hallucinations, often ending violently, to win her over to his cause. By hallucinations, I of course mean that she begins stripping constantly and getting it on with half the people at the convent, and then usually stabbing them to death with a knife, only for us to later discover that they’re still alive (though in some cases it seems that the attempted sex did happen, as a few of her would-be victims seem a little worse for wear around her). Eventually it gets so muddled that we get hallucinations within hallucinations, and after killing the Mother Superior, the other nuns all vote for her to lead them because of her great purity and goodness, for which she plans to bring them all to Hell with her.

There are some nice over-the-top moments (my personal favorite is her speech to the Mother Superior, before killing her, when she informs her that “I do not fear Hell…for I AM Hell!!!”), but there are too many deep flaws within the film for it to work. For one, while I’m certainly grateful to our lead Cecilia Pezet for being topless in about half her scenes, they would have worked a lot better if she wasn’t so plain looking. It would easily have been ten times hotter if, instead of getting completely naked, she had gotten naked except for that hat thing nuns wear (a habit? Is that what a habit is?). If you’re going to go the kinky nun route, you may as well go all the way, I say. Another critical flaw is the ending. I won’t spoil it, but it pretty much hits the reset button on the whole film, and I can’t stand it when that happens. It’s something along the lines of Boxing Helena, for anyone who’s seen that. Oh, spoiler warning I guess for anyone out there who has seen this but not Boxing Helena. Sorry.

Rating: **


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