The Other Hell (1980)
If you've seen the DVD cover for The Other Hell, you don't need me to endorse it for you. With "The Bruno Mattei Collection" plastered on it, this baby pretty much endorses itself! Bruno is one of our most dependably prolific Italian filmmakers who dabble in the various forms of exploitation films that country is notorious for. A quick rundown of his credits reads pretty much like a list of low end entries in all those genres: Hell Of The Living Dead, Rats: Night Of Terror, Violence In A Women's Prison, Robowar. Bruno's flicks are always the ones you go to after you've worked your way through all the better known ones. And usually when it's all said and done, you feel pretty much like the movie has worked all the way through you, too.
I have to confess that the ecclesiastic epic The Other Hell surprised me. Not because it was well made. Because it wasn't. Not because it featured an original story. Just your standard possessed by the Dark Lord tale here. And certainly not for its acting. Franca Stoppi from Beyond The Darkness and Carlo De Mejo from City Of The Living Dead? Wasn't George Eastman or at least Bret Halsey available? No, what thoroughly caught me off guard was that in this entire convent of nuns there wasn't a single lesbian!
That may sound like a questionable observation, but you veterans of scurvy cinema know what I'm talking about here. Nunsploitation was a word just begging to be invented and by golly if folks like Jess Franco didn't give us a reason to. From what I can tell (mainly from the write ups and the DVD covers since I'm not going to go to hell just for watching a bunch of nuns play grab ass, but see our review of The Sinful Nuns Of Saint Valentine nonetheless), once all these ladies are dropped off at nun camp, all their repressed desires blossom into full out alternative lifestyles, usually punctuated with a fair degree of guilt and a sneering and diabolical mother superior. Sometimes they also go for the boys (usually strapping gardeners or handy men), but that just irks the mother superior even more! 
The Other Hell though isn't here pretending to be a softcore porn film in religious clothing. It wants to be a horror film. More specifically, I think it wants to be The Exorcist, but with Bruno and Claudio Fragasso manning the controls who can be sure what it's really up to. Nominally about some deaths at a convent and the priest who comes to uncover their cause, the movie trips and stumbles through the outline of what it intended all the while managing to throw in scenes that didn't make sense or weren't needed or were so poorly staged you weren't sure what you were supposed to be getting from them.
In the bowels of the convent, there's a nun who is using her home embalming kit to pickle a dead nun. Another nun comes looking for someone and finds her and the next thing I know, Embalming Nun is ranting and raving about how the genitals are the devil's doorway and is stabbing this corpse's nether regions and cutting it out and holding the glop in her hands (this is one of the times I was praising Bruno's shocking incompetence with the camera). Then she whips open a coffin and it's the old mother superior and before you know it, Embalming Nun is stabbing the other nun in the back over and over.
There is some talk about this padre coming to investigate some deaths, but it's an old guy and his investigation consists of just sitting at a desk posing for a sketch that another priest is doing for him. It's a bad sketch and for some reason the priest was drawing a pitchfork next to the padre's face. Before he could finish it though, the padre has to leave because the real investigator has arrived. We stay focused on the artist priest and he wads up the picture and another priest shows up and gets another book out of the library there and they exchange pleasantries and then either Bruno or Claudio (there was some talk during one of the interviews on the DVD that they both directed scenes) remembered what their movie was supposed to be about and introduced us to Father Valerio, the real investigator.
Father Valerio is a young guy full of cutting edge ideas about good and evil. His particular brand of cutting edge involves some claptrap about how there's positive thoughts and that there is also evil stuff, too. His clash with the padre, who is a staunch believer in good old fashioned Satan (you can't go wrong with the classics, I say), lasts all of about two minutes and the next big thing the padre would be involved in is when Satan causes him to spontaneously combust and then have his charred head put in the tabernacle. (I had no clue what a tabernacle was since church is usually on Sundays and ESPN begins their NFL coverage pretty early, but it looked like a cabinet set in a bigger piece of furniture if that helps.) 
Father Valerio is determined to get to the bottom of things, but he's hampered in many different ways in the course of his investigation. Like when a medium-sized dog chases him. This is another one of those scenes that's played up a bit more than is probably wise since the whole time this dog is chasing him, the dog looks like he's just smiling and is probably going to lick him or at worst hump the crap out of his leg. But Father Valerio plays it like the Hound of the Baskervilles' rabid brother is after him. He's saved by the creepy gardener, who exists solely to provoke the possessed girl into killing him. He also chops the head off of a live chicken, but Bruno says in the interview on the DVD that it was actually the "chicken vendor" that chopped the chicken's head off, because the guy playing the gardener wouldn't do it.
At various points in the movie we travel through darkened, cobwebbed corridors of the convent and to a room where there's all these dolls hanging up and a girl lying in a bed with a cat. We also see a nun in a mask prowling around like she got lost on her way to the set of a Mario Bava or Dario Argento stalk-and-slash movie. If none of that makes any sense, I'm just assuming it's because either God works in mysterious ways or because the evil we're battling in this film is so heinous that it is incomprehensible to mere mortals!
After being stymied in his attempts at checking into things, Father Valerio gets the go ahead from the higher ups to carry out his mission with extreme prejudice. I wish I could say that this meant busting some heads, kicking in doors, and shaking down informants, but all it really meant was that Father Valerio messed up some stuff on a shelf and in a closet that this catatonic nun had. At least she was catatonic until Valerio noticed a loose tile in the floor and discovered a lock of hair under it. As he fondled this nasty bit of hair, the catatonic nun jumped off her bead and started strangling him with her rosary beads. It's a miracle! Or the result of the superpowered chick who is the daughter of Satan using her telekinesis to cause it to happen while she hovers just outside the door. You make the call! 
Father Valerio survives, the mysterious stranger disappears and it isn't long before he launches the next phase of his investigation. He gets himself a newfangled device that they call a video camera and records something. I wasn't sure what he tried to record, but what he ended up getting was a pretty convenient piece of ancient history. Let's go back about 15 to 20 years ago when the current mother superior was just a skank who sold her soul to the devil in exchange for a daughter. Her mother superior finds out about this, takes the kid from her and dumps it in a bowling pot of water, but the kid's mother rescues her. Then the mother superior strangles herself while we focus in on this kid's eye. It's obvious a doll is actually being used and we certainly hope that that extended to the boiling scene as well.
There's a funny showdown between Father Valerio and the mother superior that sees her stab him in the leg a couple of times before her daughter materializes. Then there's some tender moments between Father Valerio and the daughter and they kiss even though her boiling left her mouth all scarred up and nasty. Then the mother superior stabs her daughter which brings us to another showdown, this time involving the woman who entered into a pact with Satan and the daughter of Satan. Bruno sure isn't skimping on the showdowns in this one!
With more than ample help from co-director and screenwriter Claudio Fragasso (Zombie 4: After Death) Bruno, while not achieving the cheap lunacy of some of his other films (giant rats ruling the world, nude anthropology, Reb Brown), manages all sorts of confusing antics sure to keep the viewer in state of increasing disbelief. Telekinesis, dog attacks, boiled babies, genital slicing and sketching priests might all add up to a cringe-inducing cocktail of crudeness to most, but thankfully for us viewers, it's just another day at the office for Bruno!
|