Photo Diary : Mount Saint Bernard Abbey

Today we discovered that a few miles from our house is the astonishing Mount Saint Bernard Abbey, a working Monastary of trappist monks. In the blazing sun and beneath perfect blue skys it felt more like Italy than England.

Video Nasty #23 : Killer Nun

Synopsis: When patients at a religious hospice start dying somewhat prematurely Sister Gertrude is the prime suspect; her rule has become increasingly dictatorial and she suspiciously blacks out before every death. Doubting her own sanity, Gertrude can only find solice in mental torture of the patients, large helpings of self-medicated morphine and humiliating her doting and obsessive lesbian roommate. Is Gertrude being framed or is she really the Killer Nun?

No. It's the lesbian roommate, stupid.

Killer Nun is one of many nunsploitation movies, following a sister's fall from grace into a secular swamp of feminism, lesbianism, sadism and murder (If there was ever a film genre that was named before a film existed, it has to be Nunsploitation). I'd guess that the sexualised element is clearly playing to man’s apparent desire for a good girl gone bad, after all, nun to scum is more of a moral swing than Harold Shipman doing a fun run for Help the Aged.

Given the bluntness of the title I expected Killer Nun to be a fun throw-away movie with some unsubtle criticism of religion, the later presumably leading to its treasured place on the video nasty black list. Instead, I got a dull trashy movie that didn't work on any level; the script meanders, the kills would only mildly excite a gerontophobe and the sex scenes are about as erotic as a scat movie narrated by Werner Herzog.

Gertrude, the nun recovering from potentially botched neuro surgery is played reasonably well by Anita Ekberg, but the script gives her little to do other than look distressed, confused and angry, mostly in that order, ad nauseam. Gertrude's nihilistic fall from grace leads to some incongruous but bizarrely entertaining scenes, such as Gertrude smashing on an elderly woman's false teeth during dinner, and later forcing her lesbian roommate to wear nothing but stockings and repeat the phrase 'i'm the worst kind of whore'. Gertrude's dictatorial treatment of the patients is one of the more interesting aspects of the film, especially as the patients appear to have complete contempt for their self-appointed guardians' religion. Unfortunately, like anything potentially interesting in the film this falls along the wayside in favour of the suprisingly dull murder mystery.


One would think that the taboo of a nun murdering her flock would be interestingly subversive, but the lack of inventiveness and visual flaire reduces most of the kills to something that wouldn't look out of place in an episode of murder she wrote. It's clear that the protagonist is being framed, and the heavy handed attempts at misdirection to implicate Gertrude are transparent and tired.

Despite the promise of its explosive title, Killer Nun is a disappointing movie that fails to effectively exploit all the interesting ideas a morphine addicted, lesbian, murdering nun raises. To be honest, i'm mostly disappointed that I didn't manage to fit a 'kick the habit' pun into the review.

Photo Diary : Geocaching in White Horse Wood, Shepshed

Video Nasty #22 : The Funhouse

Synopsis: After enjoying a potent combination of marijuana and candy floss, four teenagers decide to have a sleepover in the carnival's ghost train. Hidden amongst rubber skeletons and cheap animatronics they witness the murder of an (evidently rubbish) fortune teller. Stalked by the deformed killer and his surrogate father the teens must escape the ironically named Funhouse.

Teenagers in horror films are always doing stupid things, be it running up stairs to an inescapable first floor, screaming their lungs out instead of quietly sneaking away, or using close visual inspection to ensure the bad guy's dead rather than putting a bullet in their head for good luck. I think deciding to stay the night in a ghost house is on a par with these perennial stupid decisions. You wouldn't stay the night in a hotel ran by carnies, so why stay in one of their many attractions/death traps? Nevertheless, if characters didn't make stupid decisions most horror films would follow a bunch of teenagers having good but legal fun and getting an early night; maybe with a closing shot of a glum psychotic killer sitting dejected in his nutty room after a non-starter of an evening.

Stupid decisions aside, The Funhouse is solidly made yet marginally disappointing film. The film looks and sounds great. For me, it finally proves that Tobe Hooper is a quality director, something I was unsure of after watching the grimy silliness that is Death Trap and the controversy surrounding his actual contribution to Poltergeist.


Hooper is at his best creating an unsettling calm before the storm, making the ordinary feel, often inexplicably, not quite right. As the teens explore the carnival only Amy, the film's lead, notices there's something creepy, almost malevolent about the Carnival's inhabitants. A barker's fixation on Amy, the deformed animals in the freak show and an old lady screaming bilious religious hatred at the girls all contribute to an unsettling atmosphere, creating a slow-burning dread of the inevitable events to come. Unfortunately, the time spent on this and the pointless subplot of Amy's brother running away means the teenagers don't get into the titular Funhouse until forty minutes into the film.

Once in the tardis of a funhouse the proverbial excrement really hits the rotating air conveyance device, as the teens witness a murder and are quickly discovered by the deformed killer and his creepy guardian. The duo are classic Hooper, a mentally handicapped freak (see Leatherface) and his loving yet psychotic father figure (see Leatherface's father). The killer appears early in the film shuffling around in a full frankenstein costume, complete with a snot covered rubber mask and a heavy laboured wheeze, making him suitably creepy and mysterious. Unfortunately, as with most movie monsters, when the mask is removed the killer's true form is not quite as effective or believable as whatever our imagination has concocted, despite being an impressive piece of practical effects.


The remainder of the film is satisfactory, but the by-the-numbers third act doesn't live up to the genuinely creepy lead up to the carnage. Maybe Hooper lost his nerve, or maybe their was too much pressure to produce a commercial horror film. Regardless, I'll definitely watch The Funhouse again, which isn't something I would happily say for almost all of the previous twenty one films.

Video Nasty #21 : Terreur Cannibale AKA Cannibal Terror

Synopsis: After a child kidnapping goes wrong two criminals venture in to the jungle to lay low. After being raped by one of the kidnappers a women informs the child's parents of the criminal's location, leading to a deadly chase through cannibal country.

Terreur Cannibale is made by filmmakers with so little respect for their audience that they think its ok to make up the script as they go along. Therefore, in the spirit of not caring about plot, structure, entertainment value or quality, I've decided to use my unedited viewing notes as a review...

Opens with upbeat music, sounds like La Bamba. Dubbed a little girl with a grown woman's voice! Mouths not even moving when dubbing. At least dub using voices that match the face! Decide to hide in an indian forest. No reason to run away but do anyway. Dubbing just shows that no one gives a shit about this film, quick cash grab. Border guard seduced by the plainest most unremarkable brunette. 'That's what I call a nice piece'. Obligatory stock wildlife footage. 20 cannibals next to the road. Cannibals clearly westerners. Is that offensive? Main cannibal wearing a wig. Dancing around a tiny fire. Cannibals probably called Hank and Bob, directors friends, taking a break from trucking. Footage eating innards playing ad nauseum. Nudity. Camera doesn't know what to look at. Women clearly not tied up properly. Oh, he's a rapist now? Miming guitar playing. Knocking out epic solo whilst he's playing the chords to Wild Thing. House owner goes away for two days, as soon as his wife is raped he makes it back 'sooner than I thought' (20 minutes). She didn't seem to mind being raped, has a dance party with rapist. Showing pants. Five second shot clearly a photo of one of the actors. ugh. Man ripped open by cannibals. Cannibal shot dead. Editor desperately trying to make a film out of this incongruous mess. Camera work is a mess. A practical master class in shitty film making. Cannibals are skinny white guys with canes making weird noises at each other, adorned with Fisher Price face paint. Plastic skull on sticks. Ironic that a cannibal film is so bad I want to gnaw on my arm. No women in tribe. Oh, there's one! Bullshit rituals, all they do is dance around making noises, must get boring. Man shot. And another. This jungle has mowed grass? One cannibal wearing bermuda shorts. Really dull. 15 minutes of stalking through woods. 10 minutes of dancing around, nothing happens. 5 minutes of yanking on innards. Shit shit shit.

Video Nasty #20: Evilspeak

Synopsis: Coopersmith (or Cooper-dick to, well, everyone) is the least popular cadet in military school. He's bullied daily, despised by the soccer coach and forced to clean out the church's catacombs by the pastor. Whilst cleaning out the crypt Coopersmith stumbles upon the art of black mass and, in a heartbeat, decides that the only way to get revenge on his bullys is to enlist the help of Satan. After all, revenge is a dish best served disproportionately.

I was never really persistently bullied at school, despite being an obvious target. My teenage attempts to grow locks was scuppered by my hair's ability to disregard gravity, growing away from my head but never downwards. For many years I belligerently sported a ginger afro in the misguided belief that one day my muscle-hair would give up and relax. Being a red-head was reason alone to be abused, making my noggin the size of a Space Hopper just made me an even easier target, literally. Afro aside, I was also a 'greb', a derogatory term used for anyone in our school that was in a band, read NME, knew the lyrics to Polly by Nirvana and thought most chart music was shit. I was a prime target, but for some reason I was spared from sustained bullying. I was shouted at most days and one evening attacked by ten or so yoofs in the street, but it wasn't part of any persistent campaign. The only consistant bully I had was myself, with the constant self-loathing I knew I had to perfect if I ever wanted to grow up like my miserable idols.

Despite this, I have experienced many adrenaline-fuelled moments of reverie imagining overblown retribution against some jerk that pushed me over in the school corridor or reminded me, for the two hundredth time, that my hair is still ginger. Unlike Coopersmith, the anti-hero of Evilspeak, even in my darkest moments I had never considered a black seance to harness the power of Satan. It just seems a bit mental.

Coopersmith is bullied more than your average kid. As if the archetypal teenage bullies killing his puppy wasn't bad enough, the entire military school staff despise him. The soccer coach encourages others to inure him so he can't play in the big game, the head teacher will moan about him being a welfare case to anyone who'll listen and Sarge, the drunk who lives beneath the church, repeatedly calls him a cocksucker (although given that he calls everyone a cocksucker, I suspect Sarge may have tourettes). The film is so occupied with Coopersmith being emotionally crushed by every person in his life (as mitigation for the events to come), even I felt like I should join in and give him some abuse.


When Coopersmith isn't being bullied, he spends the film typing dubious satanic latin into an even more dubious monitor sized super computer. Like all good celluloid computers, Coopersmith's PC is more powerful and advanced than Stephen Hawking after a voice upgrade. The computer perfectly translates the book and, once parsed, starts guiding Coopersmith through the satanic rites, flashing 'Blood Consecrated Host Required' like a psychopathic edition of Microsoft Windows. When he finally delivers the last ingredient (that dead puppy came in handy) the screen prints the ominous 'Data Complete' and switches to its extravagant tron-like pentagram screensaver. Unintentionally, Evilspeak's use of a computer to summon evil is a pretty prescient analogy of the how the media currently views computers. The Internet is, after all, the 21st century Video Nasty, blamed for everything broken in society like the comics, videos and computer games that came before it.

When Coopersmith finally gets his retribution it's satisfying, if not a little ridiculous. All of his fellow pupils are in the church for a pre-soccer game rally from the Priest. As Coopersmith completes the ceremony he rises through the floor from the crypt below, sword in hand and killer pigs in tow. As the crowd scrambles we're treated to Coopersmith floating around the hall mashing up people's heads with a sword and hell's pigs tearing people limb from limb. The Pièce de résistance has to be the nail in a crucification effigy becoming supernaturally dislodged and flying through the priest's forehead. As deserved as the revenge is, it is quite boring after the initial onslaught. The wire work is particularly rubbish, making Coopersmith look more like a wonky marionette then a levitating force of evil.


Evilspeak is enjoyable enough, saved from banality by a solid and empathetic performance from Clint Howard (Ron's brother). Even though the film takes a while to get going, the retribution finale is cathartic whilst being unintentionally hilarious. I can only assume the film was deemed offensive as the story is basically an unabashed endorsement of using violence for revenge, made worse by the fact that the big guy himself, Satan, is sold as an anti-hero. You know what, hats off to the filmmakers for taking a stand. The media are always vilifying Satan. Poor guy.

Video Nasty #19: Faces of Death

Synopsis: Pathologist Dr. Francis B. Gröss thinks that to truly understand death, we must face it in every possible form. To this end the good doctor has travelled the world, amassing enough footage for a feature length snuff compilation. Genocide? check. Suicide? check. Eating a live monkey's brain? check. And you thought 'You've Been Framed' was a barrel of laughs!

Faces of Death was the film on the video nasty list I was most reticent to watch. I don't find real footage of death particularly enjoyable (assuming everything in the film is real) and, ignoring the questionable morality of a snuff mega-mix, a film comprising disjointed scenes of death just sounds dull. Faces of Death did, to a degree, surpass my low expectations. That's not to say it's a good film, it just isn't as morally bankrupt or boring as i'd expected. If I can say one kind thing about Faces of Death, it's that it isn't Transformers 2.

Despite my expectations, the film does have some cohesion between scenes, provided by the narration and philosophical musings of the fictional pathologist Dr. Francis B. Gröss. The voice over is surprisingly well written, making the piece more like a morbid discovery channel documentary than the low budget exploitation it really is. Some of the learned doctor's utterances almost provide an educational slant to the sick side show, such as Gröss' cowardly but identifiable admission that if he had to work on the animal slaughter production line he revels in showing us, he'd stick with the Nut Roast (the hallal slaughter of a cow is particularly grim and bloody). Other narration is less grounded though. Gröss suggests that cancer is a manmade desease that could be erradicated through sociological changes; the motivations of a human who takes their own lives is still a mystery; and the allies quickly beat hitler's army (maybe from an American point of view they did).


I have to admit that some of the footage is genuinely exciting, but it is mostly stuff that could and should be seen in good documentaries. Open heart surgery is fascinating (ignoring the filmmakers' cheap trick of pausing the footage to imply the heart has stopped beating) and some of the real nature footage is far more interesting than the staged footage of a man being eaten by a crocodile. The footage showing the aftermath of a 727 (PSA Flight 182) crashing over San Diego is morbidly fascinating and surreal, parts of plane and bodies strewn across the well kept lawns of suburbia.

As should be expected, the handling of some footage is in very poor taste. Although I can forgive the banjo music soundtracking the headless chicken 'dancing' around (it's just a nerve reaction after all), soundtracking real footage of a person jumping to their death with Dixie Land Jazz music is horribly disrespectful. Despite being accompanied by a rightfully somber narration, holocaust footage made me extremely uncomfortable, although I suppose genocide has to be acknowledged as one of societies many unnatural causes of death.

So is Faces of Death real or fake? I spent some time researching the legitimacy of the film before I watched it, mostly as an emotional safety net for some of the more infamous scenes. Regardless of what I discovered, I was always going to watch the film, uncut, because it's the only fair way to make a judgement on the Video Nasty furore at the end of this obscenity marathon. In true mondo tradition the film is a mix of fact and fiction, with no clear indication of what is real and what is fake. The Internet puts the figure at 40% fake, which seems reasonable. The fake footage is very well shot and as such i'm not sure how I would of reacted if I saw the film in '78 on a grainy VHS, especially as I wouldn't of had the detailed film geek analysis a few mouse clicks away. Obviously no person was killed for the film, and the infamous monkey antics is a certified hoax.

There's no denying that Faces of Death is made for a juvenile audience; IMDB's forum is mostly people reminiscing about watching the movie at sleepovers and believing everything was real. Despite the target market, the film is put together with some competency and, thankfully, it's clear that no person or animal was harmed for the sake of entertainment, something which cannot be said for other films on the DPP list (Cannibal Holocaust). Faces of Death isn't a good film, It just isn't as obscene as I expected.

I think i'll pass on the three sequels.