Horror Guilty Pleasure No. 133: Convent of Sinners (dir. by Joe D’Amato)

Posted on October 11, 2026 by Arleigh

Convent of Sinners (1986) wants to expose the corruption behind convent walls, but Joe D’Amato keeps getting distracted by what he can undress inside them. That tension defines this erotic nunsploitation horror film, an atmospheric guilty pleasure with enough religious hypocrisy and malicious intrigue to suggest a sharper movie buried beneath the sleaze. D’Amato recognizes the dramatic possibilities of an institution where frustrated desire disguises itself as moral authority. He also leans so heavily on sexual titillation that his criticism struggles to compete with his exploitation instincts. The result is entertainingly disreputable, occasionally disturbing, and considerably less insightful than its premise promises.

Susanna, played by Eva Grimaldi, enters the convent after suffering sexual abuse at home, only to discover that her supposed sanctuary contains another collection of people determined to control her. The Mother Superior develops an attachment to her, a priest offers forbidden affection, and Sister Teresa resents the attention she receives. Loosely adapted from Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse, the story follows a vulnerable woman whose needs remain secondary to the desires of those claiming to protect her. Susanna becomes the object of affection, suspicion, and punishment without gaining much say in any of it. Escape from one abusive environment simply delivers her into another.

There is a strong foundation here for a bitter examination of institutional corruption. The convent’s inhabitants cannot acknowledge their feelings honestly, so attraction becomes favoritism, jealousy becomes accusation, and cruelty becomes spiritual correction. Susanna exposes tensions that already exist, but blaming her allows everyone else to avoid examining themselves. Religious authority gives ordinary resentment extraordinary reach. Someone who merely dislikes you can make life unpleasant; someone who claims your suffering serves God can make resistance look like further evidence against you. The film understands that distinction, even if it does not consistently develop it beyond another opportunity for humiliation.

Its place within the nunsploitation tradition makes that limitation especially noticeable. Ken Russell’s The Devils combines sexual obsession, religious hysteria, and institutional violence with a larger examination of political power. D’Amato uses related ingredients without approaching Russell’s ambition or furious visual imagination. Convent of Sinners concentrates on private jealousies and forbidden attachments, which could have supported a more intimate account of how authority becomes abusive. Instead, its serious implications repeatedly compete with scenes designed primarily to provoke or titillate. The comparison is useful because it demonstrates that lurid material and meaningful criticism can coexist, provided the filmmaking gives both a purpose.

Bruno Mattei’s The Other Hell offers the trashier comparison, turning a convent into a breeding ground for sinister secrets, violence, and supernatural horror. Both films exploit the reversal of sacred refuge into dangerous confinement, but Mattei foregrounds the horror-show possibilities while D’Amato emphasizes erotic melodrama. Convent of Sinners builds on this established genre territory through its mixture of religious imagery, repressed appetites, and punitive authority. Yet its reliance on sexual spectacle makes the corruption feel less like something being investigated than something supplying the next scandalous situation. The convent is an effective setting, but D’Amato does not always look beyond its exploitation value.

Karin Well’s Sister Teresa gives the persecution a concrete emotional motive. She resents the Mother Superior’s interest in Susanna, and her wounded pride feeds her vindictiveness. Underneath the religious vocabulary is someone furious about losing influence. The institution lets her disguise retaliation as moral responsibility, making her more dangerous than an openly spiteful rival. These dynamics provide some of the film’s strongest material because they reveal how easily a hierarchy can accommodate personal grudges. Teresa does not need to confess her jealousy when she can insist that Susanna is the problem. Her authority supplies the explanation her conscience ought to question.

Grimaldi gives Susanna a sympathetic presence, but the screenplay is far more interested in what happens to her than in who she is. Her longing for tenderness is understandable, and apparent affection offers a believable temptation in such an oppressive environment. Unfortunately, every refuge becomes another trap, and the repeated victimization eventually starts to flatten her character. D’Amato leans way too heavily on the sexual titillation and lurid exploitation of Susanna, weighing down whatever commentary he is attempting about religious hypocrisy and institutional corruption. Her suffering becomes an attraction in itself. The film wants us to condemn those treating her as an object while rarely resisting that temptation itself.

That mixture also connects it to The Convent of Hell, the erotic graphic novel written by Ricardo Barreiro and illustrated by Ignacio Noé. Its forbidden appetites, convent confinement, cruelty, and supernatural grotesquerie belong to the same imaginative tradition. Whether or not its creators would acknowledge these particular predecessors, the family resemblance to The Devils, The Other Hell, and Convent of Sinners is persuasive. This is a critical reading of their shared sensibility rather than a documented claim of direct influence from every film. Still, the progression makes sense: sacred imagery becomes a framework for escalating erotic excess, sometimes overshadowing whatever criticism accompanies it.

Ultimately, Convent of Sinners works better as an uneven guilty pleasure than as a convincing indictment of religious abuse. Its period atmosphere and enclosed setting lend weight to the melodrama, while its malicious characters keep the intrigue moving even when the pacing sags. There is enough solemn hypocrisy and shameless sleaze to satisfy a taste for Italian exploitation, but Susanna’s treatment grows repetitive and uncomfortable. D’Amato has found a subject with genuine dramatic bite; he simply keeps sacrificing that bite to another dose of titillation. The film peers behind the convent’s respectable façade, then becomes so absorbed in the scandal that it neglects the corruption it originally promised to expose.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

International Horror Film Review: Lisa and the Devil (dir by Mario Bava)

Posted on October 29, 2021 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Originally filmed in 1972 and tragically not seen the way it was intended to be seen until years after Mario Bava’s death, Lisa and the Devil tells the story of Lisa (Elke Sommer), a tourist who is visiting the city of Toledo, Spain with a friend. From the first minute we see Lisa walking through the streets of the city, something seems to be off. The city seems strangely deserted. The streets themselves seem menacing, in much the same way that streets of Vienna did in The Third Man.

Lisa leaves her tour group and goes in a store. A menacing, bald man (Telly Savalas) gives Lisa a strange look as he buys a dummy. The man resembles a portrait of the devil that Lisa saw earlier. Running from the shop, Lisa runs into another man (Espartaco Santoni) who appears to be following her. The man appears to fall to hi death but, despite that, the man will return later. People have a way of returning in Lisa and the Devil.

Lisa’s tour group appears to have vanished. She eventually runs into a seemingly friendly couple (Sylvia Koscina and Eduardo Fajardo) who, along with their driver (Gabriee Tinti), agree to take Lisa back to her hotel. But instead, they somehow end up outside of a dilapidated, mannequin-filled mansion. When the car breaks down, the group is invited to spend the night by the Countess (Alida Valli, who also appeared in The Third Man), who lives in the mansion with her strange but handsome son, Maximilian (Alessio Oriano). Maximilian is still mourning his ex-girlfriend, Elena. Elena, we’re told, bore a striking resemblance to Lisa.

However, it turns out that the Countess and Maximilian are not alone in the mansion. Also living in the house is the Countess’s second husband, Carlos, who just happens to be the same man that was following Lisa in the city! And finally, there’s the butler, Leandro, who is the same man who Lisa earlier saw in the shop!

Lisa and the Devil is one of my favorite Italian horror films. Yes, some of that is because I shared the same name as the movie’s main character and I love it when people say my name a lot. But I would love this film even if Elke Sommer was playing someone named Annalise or Tiffany. Mario Bava said that this film, or at least his version of the film, was one of his most personal works and the entire movie does feel like a puzzle that only one person could possibly solve. In the movie, only Leandro seems to full understand what’s happening in both the city and the house. In real life, it’s likely that only Mario Bava understood everything that happened in the film. The film mixes a giallo mystery (because people do soon start to die the mansion) with a surreal exploration of memory, regret, sin, and guilt. The movie plays out like a waking dream, leaving us to wonder just who exactly Lisa truly is and who the Devil of the title might be. It’s easy to spot the Devil. It’s less easy to spot which parts of the film are meant to be reality and which parts might simply be happening in Lisa’s mind.

Unfortunately, the film’s producer had no idea what to do with Bava’s surreal masterpiece. The few people who saw the film were baffled. The Italian censors demanded massive cut for both sex and violence and, as a result, Lisa and the Devil was one of the few Bava films not to get a theatrical release in his native country. It apparently did play in South Korea and Spain, though the Spanish version did not feature Bava’s original, mind-twister of an ending.

Even worse, for the film’s American release, the film’s producer requested that Bava add some exorcism scenes so that the film could take advantage of the popularity of The Exorcist. By now realizing that his preferred version of the film would probably never be seen, Bava agreed. With the help of his son, Lamberto, Mario Bava shot several scenes featuring Elke Sommer acting possessed while a priest played by Robert Alda tried to exorcise the demon. The original Lisa and the Devil footage was presented as being scenes from the dimension Lisa’s soul had been sent to while the demon controlled her body. The film was retitled House of Exorcism in Amercia. And here’s the thing — House of Exorcism is hardly a bad movie. Bava is Bava, afterall. Sommer does a convincing job acting possessed and the mix of new and old footage is edited together fairly well. But it’s still not the film that Bava set out to make.

Sadly, Bava’s original version of Lisa and the Devil would not get a proper video release until decades after his death. It’s not always an easy film to follow. I’ve seen it several times and there are still things about it that I still don’t fully understand. It’s a surreal masterpiece, one that is perhaps not meant to be fully understood and the type of dream-film that shows why Bava is one of the few directors that David Lynch has regularly cited as being an influence on his own work. Lisa and the Devil is a trip through a world dominated by dark and disturbing things and it’s one of the best Italian horror films to come out of the 70s. Thankfully, it can now be seen the way that Bava intended.

Death From Above: Beaks: The Movie (1987, directed by Rene Cardona, Jr.)

Posted on October 26, 2018 by Jedadiah Leland

The birds are pissed off. A hang glider gets pecked to death while flying through the sky. A chicken farmer is devoured. A professional hunter loses an eye to a bird and then has to use the remaining one to watch as the birds savagely attack his granddaughter’s birthday party. A family on vacation is forced to run for cover as their attacked by pigeons and doves. From South America to Spain to Puerto Rico, the birds are organizing and they are attacking. Can journalist Vanessa (Michelle Johnson) and her cameraman Peter (Christopher Atkins) figure out why the birds are attacking or are they destined to become the latest victims of the avian terror?

This may sound like the Hitchcock film but Beaks was directed by Mexico’s Rene Cardona, Jr. and that makes all the difference. Following in the footsteps of his father, Cardona was the king of Mexican B-movies. There was no idea strange enough or plot stupid enough that Rene Cardona, Jr. couldn’t take it and turn it into a really bad movie. Even by his standards, Beaks is bad as pigeons and doves are tossed at screaming actors. Why are the birds attacking? Caronda shows us a polluted lake as if to say, “Any questions?” In the end, the birds attack until they suddenly don’t anymore but don’t get too cocky because there are other animals out there that are looking mighty disgruntled.

For some reason, in the late 80s and early 90s, Christopher Atkins had a very busy career in bad movies. Seeing the Atkins name in the cast was usually a good sign that it was time to change the channel. In Beaks, he gets the best line when he says, “These birds know what they’re doing!” The film’s second best line goes to another actor, Gabriele Tinti, who says, “Fucking bird, flapping everywhere.”

If Hitchcock made The Birds with less skill but more gore and gratuitous nudity, the end result would still be better than Beaks.