August 9, 2018
Written by: Builio Berruti
Starring: Anita Ekberg, Paola Morra, Alida Valli
Tagline: From the Secret Files of the Vatican!
Trivia: Italian censorship visa # 73203 delivered on 13-3-1979.
Killer Nun is yet another of the infamous "Video Nasties" banned then censored in the UK during the "moral panic" of the 1980s. I've written briefly about this in previous movie posts, but if you're curious, there is a great two part documentary or just read the wiki. Basically, British politicians and conservative parents wanted a scapegoat for the wrongs of the world and instead of doing anything constructive to ail the social ills, they found that it was easier to blame it on violent movies. Giving them political clout and a sense of self-righteousness, they banned 72 films. I'm hoping to watch all of them.
Killer Nun, falls into the nunsploitation craze of the 1970s. The 1970s were the greatest decade in movie making: the camera equipment became smaller allowing filmmakers possibilities they didn't have a decade before, filmmakers had unheard of freedom to create whatever film they wanted, censorship was largely absent during the decade, and Watergate, the Vietnam war, and the failings of the sixties free love experiment had created a dark cynicism. From this came a broad genre of films called exploitation films. Within this broad genre was smaller niche genres: blaxploitation, cannibal films, naziploitation, sexploitation, revenge films, and others. One of the subgenres is the nunsploitation films. These films usually took place during a medieval period and had nuns (or sometimes the parish father) behaving in sexually deviant or violent ways.
Unlike many of the other nunsploitation films, Killer Nun is a modern tale. It follows Sister Gertrude (Ms. Sweden 1950, Anika Ekberg) who has just survived the removal of a brain tumor. Sister Gertrude worries that her recovery is being pushed too quickly. Her fears are waved off by the Mother Superior. From there Sister Gertrude goes through a rapid decline into madness and murder. Sister Gertrude begins terrorizing the patients at the geriatric hospital she works at. She stomps on a woman's dentures, forces the elderly to engage in intense calisthenics, stealing a patient's crutches forcing him to crawl, and reading violent stories of the torture of past saints.
Gertrudes exploits go beyond just harassing the elderly, at one point she goes off to town with a rind she stole from a dead woman she may or may not have killed. She finds a man and engages in impersonal sex with him. Later she has a lesbian love affair with another sister (like you're gonna have a nunsploitation film without lesbian sex? C'mon!). Gertrude also appears to have murdered several people at the hospital.
The movie does a great job of capturing the madness that Gertrude is slipping into. Murderous desires seem to come on in waves where one moment she is fine and the next there a flashes of violent images that appear in her mind. The images disorient and distract but also seem to call to her. During one scene she bludgeons a person with a candlestick. These scene is a mashup of cuts between her hand smashing the candlestick on a person's head, scenes from a dream that happened earlier in the film, and sexual and violent fantasies that persist throughout the film. The viewer is just as confused and Sister Gertrude with regards to what is real and what is fantasy, the definition of insanity.
There are hints throughout the film that Gertrude is also suffering from drug addiction. When receiving medicine there is a shot of track marks on her arm. Towards the beginning of the film she mentions her struggle with morphine. Towards the end of the film we find out just how debilitating the drugs are for her. What at first seemed like murderous desires are actually drug cravings. There is a great psychedelic-inspired twangy guitar score that helps to underline the coming on of the drug lust.
The film also has the great Andy Warhol actor, Joe Dallesandro (Flesh, Trash, Flesh for Frankenstein) who plays a doctor at the hospital and is apparently the only one, besides the patients, who notices sometime extremely wrong with Sister Gertrude. Also, the very seductive Paola Morra plays Sister Mathieu who has the lesbian sex with Gertrude and is appears topless throughout half the movie.
SPOILERS: Do not read if you don't want the ending spoiled.
The film has a great twist ending. Sister Mathieu, the nun that Gertrude had the lesbian affair with, has been killing men while Gertrude is strung out on heroin. We finally get to see Mathieu murder the person with the candlestick and the others while Gertrude lays on the floor horrified but too strung out to do anything about it. The flashes of violence make much more sense. Gertrude, witnessing the events but very high on drugs, only partially comprehends the murders. Her mind was trying to make sense of the disconnected pieces of the puzzle.
Sister Mathieu's confession at the end of the film to herself explains that these murders were her revenge for a sexual assault from her grandfather when she was a child. There is no social or political message. No critique of the Catholic church or the roles of woman. Sometimes murder can be for the simple reason of revenge.
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