NUNSPLOITATION
What a tag,
huh? Yet if we look closely at cult horror cinema we find a surprising
pie-wedge of the exploitation market comprised of a variety of films,
mostly from the ‘70s, that had the unmitigated balls to fiddle
with an exclusive nerve of outrage. Nuns, nunneries, priories and priors,
convents and abbots, abbesses, and abbeys, and so many other singularly
Christian hallmarks punted into the jaws of a genre sensibility bent
on taking a great big Number Two on the
concept of good taste.
I consider my observations for this magazine to be
those of an outsider-looking-in who also happens to be a horror novelist.
I write exploitation horror and I LOVE exploitation horror. Yet I was
essentially unaware of “Japanese” exploitation until, say,
five years ago. Who would’ve thunk? The same people who gave us
Origami have now given us some movies more revolting than anything ever
conceived.
Cool.
I DIG Nunsploitation
flicks. Bigtime. Yet few would ever connect the catchy label with the
nation of Japan. The ultimate efforts to cross the ultimate taboo –
virginal nuns (the celibate brides of Christ) dropped wimple-first into
a perverted meat-grinder of sex, rape, murder, torture, devil worship,
etc. I think not of Shintoist Japan, but of Catholic Italy, Spain, and
Mexico. After all, those great nations gave us anti-Popes, the Holy
Inquisition, forced Christianization, and holy wars that make the stuff
going on in the Middle East look like a Camp Fire Girls pillow fight.
This elusive sub-cult of cinema has served up films from the utterly
boring (Sinful Nuns of St. Valentine) to the utterly goriffic
(The Other Hell) and from the piss poor (Killer Nun) to
the excellent (Flavia
the Heretic), and everything in between. Nuns raping dudes (Satanico
Pande-monium), nuns hornier than jackals in rut (Images in a
Convent), nuns tortured with wasps (The Devils), nuns gang-raped
before a Roman worm god (Lair of the White Worm), nuns hanged
en masse (Curse of the Devil), and nuns with LOTS of underarm
hair flambee’d like Bananas Foster (Alucarda). Which one
is truly the best?
Nun of the above.
(Sorry.)
But with all
of the aforementioned shocks and shenanigans, I now give you nuns dressed
in sheep suits, nuns getting shitfaced at the local disco (no lie!),
and – again, no lie – nuns masturbating with hoagie rolls.
You know, I don’t think Wet
Rope Confession made the Vatican’s Recommended List. In
fact, my first viewing left me so pissed off I wanted to go to the Smithsonian
and gas up the Enola Gay. My Round Eye cognizance left me bereft of
the fact that this film’s director, Koyu Ohara, was
quite a rule-breaker in his day, and critically acclaimed. “So
what’s with this turd?” I wondered.
The
film reeked of Rip Off because I figured – based on the picture
quality – it had to have been made in the ‘90s. Edward
Lee got a big wrong number there. Wet
Rope Confession was released in 1979, a year before Bruno
Mattei’s genital-rending The Other Hell and a decade
before Lucio Fulci’s almost-a-masterpiece Demonia.
In other words, NO RIP-OFF. The reason the film ‘looks’ so
good is due to 1) very good direction, and 2) a superb digital transfer.
Additionally, a second and third viewing corrected my brutish first
impression. Director Ohara is weaving parody into the middle of a pretty
dang serious roundhouse of subjects: rape, deceit, morality questioning
human nature, domestic subjugation, and – a Japanese favorite –
man’s inhumanity to women. Exaggerated social symbols function
as a neo-morality play for a modern (and particularly sexist) era. Same
thing happened to me with Kubrick’s Eyes Wide
Shut. The first look left me so disappointed I wanted to shake a
copy of Clockwork Orange at Stanley’s gravestone.
But subsequent viewings revealed a masterwork and – similarly –
a consummate morality play: the modern married man’s worst nightmare.
Directors are often driven to make statements which step beyond the
priority of entertainment value. Sometimes they do it with grandeur,
sometimes they do it with ineptitude, and sometimes...
How’s this for a statement on Catholic thesis? In Wet
Rope Confession, the Boss Priest promises our suicidal female
Miki (Yuki Nohira) that she can be forgiven for her sins
by agreeing to “serve God as His slave.” That’s a clergyman’s
endorsement for joining a convent! As for man’s inhumanity to women...
it seems that Japanese filmmakers have that one nailed. When Miki gets
raped by thugs on her wedding night, does her husband offer comfort
in her trauma? That’s a big HELL NO. He kicks her out of the house,
citing, “You’ve lost your innocence. Go out of my life!”
Nice guy.
Where other directors
make their “statements” via convention, Ohara implements outre
instead, creating sort of a Japanese Theater of the Absurd. The reason
it works is via some conspiracy of techniques, treatments, and trimmings
of style all folded into function, (plus, I reiterate, very good direction).
The result: a negative yet provocative social thesis built on the footing
of a commercial rape-revenge story.
And when you viddy the St. Animal Celebration, you’ll know what
I mean...
Entertainment rarely arrives with audacity such as this. Wet
Rope Confession winds up standing tall next to damn near any
Nunsploitation flick you can name.
Next
on the Hit List: Convent
of the Sacred Beast (Sei Ju Gakuen, aka School of
the Holy Beast), by an infamous exploitation director named Norifumi
Suzuki. Suzuki’s known for B-movies that look much more
expensive than the Herschel Gordon Lewis budgets his producers
generally coughed up. According to the commentary, Sacred Beast
was the final film to reveal ‘70s-‘80s sensation Yumi
Takigawa buck naked (Ah-OOOO-Gah!), and was actually re-released
in theaters after she cemented her fame. (Hey, every little bit helps,
right?) We’re talking outright S&M exploitation here: nuns
stripped bare to be bound, raped, molested, whipped (and even flensed
with rose branches—ouch!). More than a few Japanese film makers
let their scenes get so outrageous as to become ineffective, but Suzuki
maintains an eyelids-glued-open visual discipline, a frame-by-frame
sense of premeditated CARE (which probably made him a bitch to work
for.) This was so apparent to me... who Suzuki manipulated
– and, yes, exploited! – the building blocks of (let’s
face it) B-Movie pervert-fodder and elevated it to something much more
important.
Nun movies? Important?
Here me out...
Suzuki
does well to make us assume that protagonist Maya (Takigawa)
joins the nunnery to escape a corroding morality and to atone for her
sins. But the convent is steeped with erotic mysteries the instant she
sets foot in the joint, in fact, there’s something a tad mysterious
about HER. Dang it! I can’t tell you too much without blowing the
surprises, but I’ll mention that a hangman’s noose around
the neck of a pregnant nun works into the grim mix. I’ll also be
careful to say we’ve seen a similar I-Don’t-Know-Who-My-Father-Is-Plot
before in The Other Hell, and... wouldn’t you know it? Convent
of the Sacred Beast pre-dates that one by six years. Kind of
makes you wonder...
Ultimately, Sacred Beast has all the cogs and
gears that make nun movies tick: blasphemy (of course!), a genuine convent
with symbols of Christ looking upon every secret act of carnality, corrupt
and hypocritical religious authority figures, and – well, how do
I say this without sounding like a sexist pig – A BEVY OF THE VERY
BEST LOOKING WOMEN YOU’VE EVER SEEN IN A NUN MOVIE!
There.
It’s out
of my system now. But as for those cogs and gears? Suzuki
uses them to build a Rolex in a shop full of five-dollar made-in-China
specials. The power here is the vision that he thrusts upon us, and
it’s a pretty cool power. Words like “indictment,” “statement,”
“sub-text,” and “metaphor” are often blathered on
moody sexual horror movies as a half-assed excuse for work that’s
simply either poop or sheer T&A. Here, though, they all ring true.
It’s serious business. Suzuki distills the dichotomy
– on purpose, I’m sure – by interchanging the austere
Catholic atmosphere with razor-sharp nude scenes of preposterously attractive
women. The scenes will challenge even the most pious viewers, and make
us ask the questions that Suzuki FORCES us to ask –
about faith – in general and in specificity.
Doesn’t everybody wonder what’s really cooking in the heads
of nuns and priests? Isn’t it normal to wonder that, and –
come on! – isn’t it fun? How often does faith actually win
out over innate impulse? Suzuki shows us the worst-case-scenario with
sexual imagery that’s on one hand too brutal to watch and on the
other too vivid and beautiful NOT to watch. I suspect that his selection
of super-hottie actresses is cruel and deliberate, and... ultimately
functional? You decide while I... excuse myself for a moment or two,
if you know what I mean.
In America, the mid-’60s spurred the big censorship-in-art
debate, but in Sacred Beast’s DVD special features, a critic
points out that the same thing didn’t happen in Japan until the
‘70s, and that Suzuki’s film played a role in
opening some minds of the Powers That Be. Here it was William
Burroughs’ Naked Lunch; in Spain, the horror flicks
of De Ossorio, Naschy, and Jess Franco; and in
France, Jean Rollin. Hence, what’s even more notable than
Sacred Beast’s stunning look and primo entertainment is
its existence as part of an example (“Cult movies need not be junk,
damn it!”) that changed the times with some impact.
I could sit here all day and tell you why this movie is a unique must-see
venture, but then my editor would just think I was rolling him on the
word count. So I’ll leave it at this: What starts out as “Here
comes another nun movie!” blooms into a scape of pristine eroticism
and multifaceted mystery, something I’d be inclined to label as
Nippon Noir. An exploitation formula has suddenly become something new
and almost unheard of: a masterpiece of Nunsploitation.
Watch it, or
miss out.
Oh, and did I
mention that there’s A BEVY OF THE VERY BEST LOOKING WOMEN YOU’VE
EVER SEEN IN A NUN MOVIE!?
Oh. Yeah. I did.
