THE OTHER HELL

HOW MUCH MORE SPOILERY COULD IT BE? THE ANSWER IS NUN...NUN MORE SPOILERY.

It's oddly refreshing to find a European horror movie set in a convent full of possessed nuns where there's nary a nipple and not a pube to be seen from start to finish. The only bare boobs to be seen are on one nun who's already dead and being prepared for embalming; otherwise everyone thankfully keeps their kit on at all times. Don't misunderstand: I'm in favour of naked women bouncing around the screen as much as anyone, but I usually want a bit more reason for it than "hey, guys, clock the norks on that". Even though it's directed (pseudonymously) by Bruno Mattei, auteur of Emanuelle In Prison, Violence In A Women's Prison and numerous other todger-friendly sleaze items, for some reason there's none of that sort of thing going on here.

There's still a bit of blood and gore - Mattei also directed Zombie Creeping Flesh and Rats: Night Of Terror, after all - in The Other Hell: mysterious deaths are occurring at a convent, but are they down to human or diabolical causes? Since an early scene has the Mother Superior hacking the private parts off a corpse and shrieking "The genitals are the gateway to hell!", it's natural to assume it's simply a case of insanity, but there's much more to events than that...

Further mysteries: what's with the neatly arranged piles of bones and skulls in the catacombs? And why all the mannequins, naked and suspended from the ceiling in the attic? I actually quite enjoyed The Other Hell: it's free of the tiresome nudity and lesbian gropeathons which have been a staple of this sort of filth for years, and there's a mystery in there that's worth getting interested in as well as touching lightly on the rational/demonic debate (is Satan real or just the evil bit of humanity?) - but only lightly because it soon comes down pretty firmly with the latter, probably because it makes for better horror movies. Modest entertainment anyway, and again it's a shame there's no UK distribution outside of a questionably legitimate YouTube upload. I know there's no real market for it, but it would be nice to access it properly.

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