The Importance Of Nunsploitation In Horror Films

A film only review. There’s a UK DVD release (£20 new, £6.50 second hand), which is quite heavily cut. There’s an uncut German release, but the reason for some of the UK cuts is that the lead actress was only 17 when the film was made, so you might want to think twice before trying to import that…

Jess Franco was a staggeringly prolific Spanish director of horror and sleaze movies. Active from the early 60s until his death in 2013, Franco directed almost 200 films, which range from vaguely respectable horror films to hardcore porn. Most of his efforts have a cheap and cheerful, almost homemade quality (his last few films were apparently literally made in his living room), but there were periods of his career when he managed to get reasonable

budgets for his films, and turned out work that is technically proficient, if not actually very good.
I used to hate Franco’s films with a passion. But I kept seeing them, almost by accident, and have now, rather shamefully, seen more films by him than any other director (take that, Hitchcock!). His fans – and while I wouldn’t quite describe myself as a fan, I’m certainly not so badly disposed towards him as I was – insist that the more of his films you see, the more everything starts to make sense. That’s true enough. You start to recognise the themes he kept coming back to, like a dog eating its own sick. Franco clearly had some hang-ups, but what the hell, he finished more films than Orson Welles. That’s got to count for something.

(Amazingly, Franco actually worked with Welles – he was 2nd unit director on Chimes at Midnight, and is believed to have shot parts of the fantastic battle sequence.)
Year: 1977
Director: Jesus Franco
More information at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076312
IMDB user rating: 5.6

This is set in the past – probably 16th century. A young girl, Maria, is seen canoodling with her sweetheart by a corrupt priest, Father Vincent. He has her confined to a convent where he and the Mother Superior worship the devil. They soon have poor Maria’s innocence firmly in their sights.
It should be noted that, in spite of its title, there are no love letters in this film.

This obviously had a bit of budget behind it – it was made for the Swiss producer Erwin C Dietrich, who financed a lot of Franco’s films in the mid to late 70s. Some of Franco’s trademark technical problems are absent. The camera stays in focus most of the time and doesn’t wobble much, for instance. But other Franco obsessions – lesbian scenes, female nudity, torture, corrupt authority figures – are very much in evidence.
Nunsploitation is an exploitation subgenre that appeared in the wake of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), a film which had lots to say about religion and politics, but which is mostly remembered for the naked nuns.

Nunsploitation basically developed as a variant on the ‘women in prison’ film, a genre which offered plenty of opportunities for shower scenes, girls kissing, and general brutality. Nunsploitation puts the prisoners in wimples, does away with the communal showers, and usually offers a faintly literary gloss, but it’s basically the same thing. There are a few good nunsploitation films (Alucarda and Satanico Pandemonium are lots of fun), but most of them offer mucho sleaze to little effect. Love Letters is definitely in that

tradition.

Poor young Maria is bullied and tortured, and possibly raped by Satan himself (although it’s not entirely clear whether that’s real or just a dream).

And that’s just the start of her troubles! It seems like literally everything she says or does lands her in deeper trouble. You’ll find yourself rooting for her because she’s the only nice person in the film, but she’s a bit too passive in her acceptance of all the nasty stuff that happens to her. Franco was a big fan of the Marquis de Sade, and Maria resembles the heroine of De Sade’s novel Justine, the virtuous girl on whom all manner of evils are heaped (Franco also adapted that novel, more than

once).
Being a Franco film, there are some (weirdly slow) lesbian scenes, and quite a lot of nudity, but it doesn’t stoop to the porny depths of some of the films he made around the same time (I’d hope this is out of deference to the lead actress’s age). Oddly, the nuns tend to keep their wimples on when they’re tinkering with one another, which might be intended to be kinky, but just seems lazy. There is a lengthy torture scene which is quite nasty (and very obviously cut in the UK release). It’s not made with enough proficiency to be realistic, but it’s still an unpleasant scene to watch. The torture is clearly intended to titillate.

The acting is rather bland considering the film offers prime opportunities for going over the top. The satanic Mother Superior (who bears the slightly unlikely name ‘Alma’) hardly ever seems excited about anything (even when two nuns are licking her legs, although in fairness she’s having some trouble with a poultice at the time). Evil Father Vincent has an amusing attitude to the confessional (he basically treats it like phone sex, getting the girls to confess to all manner of filth while he discreetly pleasures himself). In spite of the opportunity that offers for an actor to go really overboard, he underplays everything, which is disappointing (he’s played by William Berger, the only actor I recognised – he’s a perennial in Spaghetti Westerns and other Italian exploitation).
Young Maria is completely passive, and has little to do bar cry. I kept waiting for her to write some love letters, but I guess that would have been too proactive. The only actor who seems to be having any fun is the wonderfully-named Herbert Fux, who makes a brief appearance as Satan himself in an orgy scene, hamming it up like a champion.

The reason Jess Franco had to make his smutty movies in places like Germany or Switzerland, of course, is that Spain was ruled by a fascist government with a very strict censorship regime. Franco was unable to work in his home country without interference (General Franco – no relation – died in 1975, but it took several years before the country began to liberalise). This probably explains his fascination with prisons and other institutions in which arbitrary rules are devised to allow the governors to maintain their power over the governed. It would be an exaggeration to describe Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun as a metaphor for life under Franco (the lesbian threesome scene doesn’t map onto any historical event I’m aware of). But it’s definitely there in the mix, as it is in all of the many sadistic prison films Jess made in the 70s.
As mentioned, the film is made with more technical proficiency than most of Franco’s movies. The music is pastiche classical – devotional choruses and so on – rather than Franco’s usual groovy acid jazz, and none of his regular cast appears. It lacks some of the shonky appeal of his weirder outings, but would probably be easier to sit through for the relative Franco novice. It’s never quite boring.

In all likelihood, you won’t want to see this, and you won’t be missing much. But if you were tempted by Jess Franco – and plenty are – it’s perhaps a good ‘entry level’ film, in that it offers an introduction to some of his enduring themes without being too tedious or badly made. Everyone else, just give it a wide berth.