Sacred Flesh

For Nunsploitation fans, this movie is a must. For all others: Don't bother to watch. Basicly it's a sex film with no plot. In her visions a mother superior is discussing with Mary Magdalene about sexual desire and her denial of it. She also tells us the confessions some nuns made to her, which are shown in several sex scenes. Unfortunately the nuns in these scenes have hardly any dialog and are just beautiful bodies without any character behind. The movie is sometimes close to porn, but neither really dark nor disturbing. On the positive side, the sex scenes are well made and the movie has some good visuals (like the opening credits), only the outdoor scenes have the quality of a made for TV film.

The sex scenes I give 8/10, the movie itself 5/10.

Nigel Wingrove cocks a snook at the then recently retired James Ferman for his banning of 'Visions Of Ecstasy' a decade earlier.

A feature length shot on video imbroglio of cosmetically enhanced and fully shaven nuns doing close-up 'penance'.

Yes the scenes of the devilish succubus reciting arch dialogue are amusing, in a Lair Of The White Worm type way. But they are few and far between, and if you're not into the heavy breathing stuff, it's too boring waiting for them.

Very poor stuff all round. Redemption was so much better than this in the beginning when they got so many of us into obscure foreign horrorsploitation.

I saw this in London. There were five people in the audience. I think the intent was to make an arty euro porn film, but it looks like it was shot on beta and suffered from dropout and poor colouring. The story goes nowhere, just a tempted mother superior and various nun couplings. I really made the effort to see this one after enjoying the far superior RAZERBLADE SMILE, but Eileen Daly is truly wasted in this mess. Pity.

Nigel Wingrove's less than spectacular try on the nunsploitation genre is quite ridiculous a film indeed, on every level. A Mother Superior is suffering from an extreme form of horniness-induced delirium brought about by her reading the carnal confessions of her fellow sisters, who invariably are silicone pumped sex fiends prone to succumbing to the callings of their young flesh. She descends into a hallucinatory limbo where Mary Magdalene herself encourages her to stop the mortification of her flesh and instead save her sanity by giving in to her innate sexual frenzy. Whipping, masturbation, lesbianism and group sex follow, as they should.

This film sucks, but in a good way. Acting is terrible, costumes laughable and the soft-core sex scenes tame, poorly performed and devoid of any illusion of feeling whatsoever. I've always imagined the real sex life of nuns to be much dirtier, perverse and more demented.

That's not to say the time spent on this flick was wasted. In a right state of mind, with the right company, watching this piece of garbage can be an exquisite pleasure.

Recommended for true connoisseurs of the poopier side of cinema.

British nunsploitation, made as a tribute to the European nun flicks of the 70s (director/writer Nigel Wingrove is actually the founder of UK media company Salvation, which distributes work by directors such as Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Bruno Mattei, and Lucio Fulci).

In the past (we don't know exactly when, but people travel around on horseback) a Mother Superior has become obsessed with lustful thoughts after hearing confessions from some of her young nuns. In her agitated state she imagines having a conversation with Mary Magdalene and (for some reason ) a zombie nun, during which she recounts four of these confessions. As she does so we see them played out.

All the young nuns are played by 'adult entertainment' actresses - not surprising given the scenarios are nude soft-core involving self-flagellation and/or sex between nuns. The acting is atrocious, and the 'story' is nothing but an excuse to show... stuff. However... compared to most skin-flicks (IMDb classifies this simply as 'horror', but let's call it what it is), it clearly has a budget, with a nifty title sequence, good location work (inside and outside), costumes, props, a (relatively) large cast, and a 1 hr 15 min runtime. The camerawork is also pretty good, and the girls are hot (although obvious boob jobs, lipstick, and nail-varnish do look out of place on nuns; no wonder so much stuff was going on!). Oh, for Brits there's a cameo by cult actress and sometime TV presenter Emily Booth. 5/10.