6.3 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
In order to be reunited with her true love, a young woman forced to live in a convent must resist seduction by her lesbian cellmate, endure the deranged tortures of the Inquisition, and escape from a madhouse within the convent walls.
Starring: Paolo Malco, Jenny Tamburi, Bruna Beani, Françoise Prévost, Franco ResselHorror | 100% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.36:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Italian: LPCM Mono
English
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 3.0 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
What a title, right? Unfortunately, The Sinful Nuns of St. Valentine doesn't quite live up to its kinky promise. Yes, there are a few naughty sisters—whose cloistered lives have led them to cravings for depravity—but all in all this is one of the tamer "nunsploitation" flicks of the 1970s, which took the simmering sensuality of Powell & Pressburger's 1947 convent drama Black Narcissus and brought it to a more-explicit boil, with gratuitous nudity and bald-faced blasphemy galore. For those of non-Catholic backgrounds, this defrocked sub-genre may not have the same fetish-y allure of the taboo, but everyone can understand the titillation of profaning the sacred and despoiling the supposedly pure. It's wrong. It's seamy. It's the stuff of catechism class daydreams. (Protestants have no direct equivalent, but imagine fantasizing about your Sunday School teacher.) In the better examples of the genre, there's also usually an element of social criticism involved, by way of satirical jabs at the capital-C-Church and its perceived tyrannies. It's no surprise, then, that the majority of these grindhouse movies were made in the Catholic strongholds of Italy, France, and Spain, by progressive low-budget filmmakers outside the mainstream. The Sinful Nuns of St. Valentine is the work of Italian director and screenwriter Sergio Grieco, who is perhaps best known—if he's known at all—for helming a series of cheapo James Bond parody movies. Here, he’s most clearly riffing on Ken Russell’s controversial 1971 film The Devils, which may not have sparked the whole nunsploitation genre, but certainly fanned the flames.
The Sinful Nuns of St. Valentine conforms to Kino-Lorber and Redemption Films' usual "as-is" aesthetic, with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that hasn't been cleaned up or digitally restored in any significant way. White and black specks, small hairs stuck at the edge of the frame, light scratches, mild color fluctuations—all are present to varying degrees, though none are particularly distracting, especially if you watch a lot of this type of low-budget Euro-sleaze cinema. On the plus side, there are no signs of edge enhancement or other attempts to artificially boost the picture, and while the film's grain structure is very heavy—if often looks more like 16mm than 35mm—this is preferable to a picture that's been smeared with digital noise reduction. While the high definition presentation is certainly a step up from DVD, overall clarity here is unimpressive, with a look that's often mushy and soft, only tightening during the tightest closeups, where we start to see some fine detail. Color seems reasonably balanced, though, with consistent levels of saturation and contrast. The encode also appears free of any obvious compression issues.
The film's audio also has its age and budget-related issues—light hisses, crackles, splice pops, and dynamic thinness—but this Linear PCM 2.0 mono track is nonetheless listenable, with no major distractions, a la sudden drop-outs or harsh peaking. The dubbed-in Italian dialogue is relatively clear, and Coriolano Gori's flute and string-heavy score sounds as good as can be expected from this caliber of a film. No real issues here. The disc defaults to English subtitles—which appear in easy-to-read white lettering—but these can be turned off if your Italian is up to snuff.
The only extra on the disc is a collection of high definition trailers for other thematically similar Kino/Redemption releases, including Virgin Witch, Black Magic Rites, House of Whipcord, Marquis De Sade's Justine, and Killer's Moon.
The Sinful Nuns of St. Valentine tries to combine a serious story with gratuitous nun-fetish titillation—in this way, it's like a sub-par version of Ken Russell's The Devils, its most obvious inspiration—but it doesn't really succeed on either account. The plot is your standard Romeo & Juliet ripoff, and the fleshy stuff is tame compared to some of the other nunsploitation films of the 1970s. Still, if Euro-sleaze cinema is your thing, The Sinful Nuns of St. Valentine is probably worth watching at least once, and Kino/Redemption's Blu-ray is probably the best way to go about it. The "as-is" transfer may have its age-related print damage, but the picture quality is a solid step up from Redemption and Image Entertainment's old DVD.
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