4.8 | / 10 |
Users | 3.5 | |
Reviewer | 1.5 | |
Overall | 1.6 |
The devout Sister Sarah is abused, beaten and drugged by corrupt clergy who have turned to dealing heroin. Near death from a lethal overdose of drugs, she receives a spiritual calling to wreak God's vengeance on all the evildoers she has encountered, showing no mercy.
Starring: Asun Ortega, David Castro (I), Perry D'Marco, Tomas Boykin, Bill Oberst Jr.Thriller | 100% |
Erotic | 78% |
Dark humor | 27% |
Crime | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English SDH, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 1.0 | |
Video | 2.5 | |
Audio | 2.5 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 1.5 |
Robert Rodriguez should demand royalties. Exploitation auteur Joseph Guzman's Nude Nuns with Big Guns (hereafter "NNwBG") borrows so shamelessly in tone, plot, style, technique, music and just about everything else from such films as Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn that a trailer for it should have played between the two halves of the Rodriguez/Tarantino double feature known as Grindhouse (from which Guzman also wantonly steals). But someone other than Guzman would have had to make the trailer. He lacks the twisted wit that made the Grindhouse trailers a hoot, and NNwBG doesn't aspire to the self-aware reinvention of a bygone era that stylized the look of Grindhouse and kept the viewer at an ironic distance from the teases and titillation that were, as its creators understood all too well, the true purpose of those schlock concoctions. Tarantino and Rodriguez grasped how grindhouse cinema let American filmmakers test (and sometimes shift) the line between pornography and mainstream film in an era before rapid home video releases made it easy for studios to show PG-13 versions in theaters followed by unrated counterparts for guilty-pleasure indulgence in the privacy of one's own home. Guzman has no such academic interests. He wants to get as much sex, bare flesh, violence and transgression into his movie as possible, and as the title of his film suggests (score one for truth-in-advertising), he does it with a directness and simplicity from which many directors could learn a lesson. Like a good Catholic, Guzman seems to realize that the greater the sin, the more intense the pleasure; so he leaves no option unexplored: priests as gangsters, lesbian nuns, violations of the eucharist, roomfuls of nude nuns (wimples only), virtuous nuns being raped (not to mention a few innocent bystanders), etc. In a formula that worked perfectly for Charles Bronson's Death Wish films, the (mostly male) audience is given permission to gape with voyeuristic fascination at all these horrible (no, really, just horrible) proceedings, because they're confident that appropriately bloody retribution will be forthcoming. And arrive it does, courtesy of one Sister Sarah, who strides into her big confrontation carrying, not El Mariachi's guitar, but a violin case, after the top criminal, Chavo (in place of Bucho), has wasted a lot of time futilely ordering his men to find her. And, yes, Chavo gets what's coming to him. It happens at a biker bar called "The Titty Flickers" (in place of "The Titty Twister"). And the accompanying music sounds awfully close to the theme from Grindhouse.
I have not been able to obtain definitive information about the shooting format of NNwBG, but it appears to my eye to have been originated on hi-def video. Regardless of the original capture technique, the final product has been heavily processed for an artificial look that is often awash in a single color (typically red or yellow) or simply blown-out with high contrast. The result is an image with a lot of "pop" but relatively poor detail and little in the way of true black, which is somewhat problematic in a film filled with priestly vestments and nun's habits. Still, this appears to be the intended look, for better or worse, and Image's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray delivers it. Perhaps the excessive contrast and the unrealistic color palette were director Guzman's attempted equivalent for the faux print damage and other techniques used by Tarantino and Rodriguez to suggest low-budget grunge in Grindhouse. (If so, it would be one his few original touches. Then again, the cinematographer was Edwin M. Figueroa, who is a professional.) The usual transfer issues we look for in Blu-rays (DNR, EE) wouldn't be an issue in a hi-def video production and, in any case, wouldn't be distinguishable from the stylized ugliness of the film's general look. No compression errors distracted from the copious displays of female flesh, none of which could be included in screenshots under rules governing what can and can't be shown in Blu-ray.com reviews.
If this were a Robert Rodriguez film, there'd be an active and aggressive audio mix. But it isn't; so there's not. Gunshots lack impact; motorcycles aren't especially loud; and the surround speakers don't get much of a workout. The dialogue is clear enough, but it might as well not be for all the substance it supplies, and the score credited to Dan Gross (whose instructions were obviously to recycle as much of Grindhouse as possible) sounds cheap and compressed. The track may be DTS-HD MA 5.1, but the more relevant acronym is GIGO ("garbage in, garbage out").
I have no problem with exploitation cinema, because it's often a format for exploring important concerns in a frank and honest fashion that isn't possible anywhere else. Vigilante pictures have been a hardy genre in American cinema since at least the Seventies, and as I discussed in a review of Law Abiding Citizen on another forum, the resilience of the vigilante hero attests to his (or her) continued ability to strike responsive chords in audience members at a deep emotional level that cannot be easily dismissed. NNwBG takes a few sips from that well, but it has a different agenda, and it's the kind where, as the saying famously goes, you know it when you see it. If you're a former Catholic schoolboy who spent far too many hours imagining what nuns looked like under those habits, then Joseph Guzman has made the ultimate fetish movie for you. Of course, he's made it as gratuitously brutal as possible, which suggests that he thinks anyone who enjoys it deserves the fate of Brother John (Bill Oberst, Jr.), who gets beaten to death by Chavo for "damaging" Sister Sarah. But you can't expect to indulge in sin without punishment, right? Definitely not recommended.
Collector's Edition
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1984
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מי מפחד מהזאב הרע / Mi mefakhed mehaze'ev hara
2013
Grindhouse Presents Death Proof | Extended and Unrated
2007
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2005
1975
2018
2011
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Unrated Director`s Cut
1980
1980
1985
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1976
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