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FROM THE SECRET FILES OF THE VATICAN! Aging blonde-bombshell Anita Ekberg (La Dolce Vita, Pick-up Alley) gives a full-bodied performance as a sex-crazed sister with some seriously bad habits in the lurid cult classic Killer Nun.

One of the most notorious ‘nunsploitation’ films, Killer Nun tells the sordid story of Sister Gertrude, a disturbed woman of the cloth who degenerates into a perverse mire of drug taking, sexual perversion, sadistic torture and murder. Joe Dallesandro (The Climber, Flesh for Frankenstein), Alida Valli (The Possessed, Suspiria) and the ample Paola Morra (Behind Convent Walls) offer spirited performances and able support to Ekberg, in this shocking tale based on real events.

Boasting an incongruously classy score by legendary composer Alessandro Alessandroni (Women’s Camp 119) and stylishly rendered scenes of sex and murder, Killer Nun takes the viewer on hair-raising journey from the heights of religious ecstasy to the depths of devilish degeneracy. Now Giulio Berruti’s sleazy classic is presented in a stunning new 2K restoration, with a liturgy of new extras, ready to be preyed upon.

SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS
• New 2K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative
• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
• Uncompressed mono 1.0 LPCM audio
• Original English and Italian soundtracks, titles and credits
• Newly translated English subtitles for the Italian soundtrack
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing for the English soundtrack
• New audio commentary by Italian genre film connoisseurs Adrian J. Smith and David Flint
• Beyond Convent Walls, a new video essay on nunsploitation and Killer Nun by critic Kat Ellinger
• Starry Eyes, a new interview with director Giulio Berruti
• Cut and Noise, a new interview with editor Mario Giacco
• Our Mother of Hell, a new interview with actress Ileana Fraia
• Original Italian and international theatrical trailers
• Image gallery
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Daryl Joyce

I never got to watch this even though I bought the Blue Underground Blu-ray because the inside of the factory sealed case was covered in a mysterious vaseline-like substance, something I did not discover until well past the return window. Perhaps it was divine intervention?

Here's the trailer, watch out for the dummy death!

This is one of the original video nasties, though it is on the relatively tame end of things, and was edited by only a couple of seconds for many years in the UK mostly for the scene in which a nun is tortured by having pins poked around her eyelids. I guess this might be the first unedited release of the film in the UK. The chance to see how the Italian soundtrack compares to the English dub will be interesting, and the extras will make me consider the upgrade.

Joe Dallesandro is in this extremely briefly as the putative love interest, as it Lou Castel from Fists in the Pocket. Alida Valli is a great Mother Superior, appearing in between her Argento roles in Suspiria and Inferno. But really its Anita Ekberg's film and she goes all out for it, particularly in a brief sojurn from the convent in which she gets up to some incredibly naughty behaviour in a back alley! It also has the most drawn out (and eventually pointless in the larger scheme of things) scene of a disabled person painstakingly dragging themselves up a spiral straircase in cinema!

colinr0380 wrote: Sat Jul 27, 2019 9:50 am I guess this might be the first unedited release of the film in the UK.

But this release will be US/Canada-only.

I thought this was pretty dull. One of the endless video nasties that failed to live up to the promise of its title or VHS cover. It’s pretty light in the killer nun department, but I do remember endless scenes of Ekberg wrestling with the morality of it all as if this were a serious drama or something.

sabbath wrote: Sat Jul 27, 2019 11:30 am

colinr0380 wrote: Sat Jul 27, 2019 9:50 amI guess this might be the first unedited release of the film in the UK.

But this release will be US/Canada-only.

Oh, sorry! I missed that completely!

On Mr Sausage's point, I would generally agree. Not too many nunsploitation films got released in the early VHS era to become video nasties, so that might have something to do with Killer Nun being an outlier (and really its more for the brief moment of eye violence than the rather underwhelming murder plot). Something like Bruno Mattei's The Other Hell is the more action packed horror film, and then there's the eye popping Japanese entry School of the Holy Beast (very NSFW!). Though I'm waiting for someone to put out Walerian Borowczyk's Behind Convent Walls, which is the truly transgressive naughty nunsploitation film (The image of Christ on the base of a hand-fashioned marital aid, for example!), and one of the few films that captures the painful eroticism of repressed desires.

I enjoyed this well enough. It's complete trash, and I wasn't paying enough attention to divine whether or not the plot actually made sense (I suspect not), but it was well-shot and well-edited and had great music. A blowsy Ekberg hurls herself into a silly, over-complicated role. Is her problem that she's a sadist, a nymphomaniac, a drug addict, a hypochondriac or a reluctant lesbian? Why not all five? Why not make her the victim of a conspiracy too? She seems to be having fun, and I went along for the ride.