Nude Nuns With Big Guns Blu-ray Review
I Spit on Your Unconsecrated Grave
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, February 9, 2012
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.
A group of priests, headed by some sort of high church official (Oto Brezina), have taken to
dealing heroin. (By keeping the details vague, Guzman neatly dodges the question of whether the
church itself is complicit in these activities.) Like many large drug operations, at least in the
movies, the gangster-priests use women in their processing operations, and they require them to
work nude to eliminate any risk of concealment and theft, whether for profit or for personal use.
Since this is a Catholic operation, the women in the drug factories are nuns, but curiously they're
allowed to retain their wimples, even though these would seem ideal places to stash drugs. But
the audience came to see nude
nuns, right? So some portion of the habit has to be retained to
accompany the bare breasts, or the image doesn't deliver the requisite depravity.
The gangster-priests also use the nuns as cover when making deliveries in a parish bus to their
prime customers, a biker gang called Los Muertos (as in "Flores por . . ."). The gang is led by the
aforementioned Chavo, and he's a Truly Evil Person. But it's not as if we know this because the actor playing him,
David Castro, effectively portrays Chavo as evil incarnate. Castro is no more
convincing playing a bad man than is your average porn actor playing an irresistible seducer.
He's simply a performer with the appropriate equipment—in this case, a scruffy beard, a raspy
voice and a mischievous smile—going through the appropriate motions. In
NNwGB these include
despicable deeds like indiscriminately executing nuns in the parish bus when the heroin delivery is light;
directing a subordinate to rape a nun to break her vow of silence; and making the father and
daughter of a randomly encountered tourist family watch while the mother is raped, then killing the parents and
handing over the daughter as a "gift" to an underling.
Guzman lingers over Chavo's worst abominations at lengths far greater than is necessary to
advance the story, because luxuriating in degradation is the
real purpose of a film like
NNwBG. All that's required is that Chavo himself end badly—worse, if possible, than his victims. (It's
certainly more graphic.) His downfall comes courtesy of Sister Sarah (Asun Ortega), one of the
casualties on the bus with the "short" heroin delivery. She's nursed back to health by an elderly
Chinese man, Mr. Foo (Maxie J. Santillan Jr.), who provides her with a fancy set of pistols ("the
Lord's tools") before making the unfortunate discovery that no good deed goes unpunished.
Sarah sets off to destroy not only Chavo, but also the entire network of crooked priests that
supplies him and anyone else who participated in the destruction of her life's dream of quiet
devotion to the Lord's service, including her duplicitous Mother Superior, Magda (Emma
Messenger).
Sarah succeeds to spectacular effect, but along the way she encounters something unexpected:
earthly love with another victimized nun, Sister Angelina (Aycil Yeltan). Sarah's and Angelina's
relationship gives Sarah something personal to fight for, and it also gives Guzman an excuse to
stage explicit girl-on-girl (or nun-on-nun) scenes that add yet one more titillating blasphemy to
the list. It also gives him an opportunity to rip off—excuse me,
pay homage to—the scene in
Desperado where Steve Buscemi describes El Mariachi's exploits to the entranced listeners at
the Tarasco Bar, with Sister Angelina playing Buscemi's part, but in a confessional.
NNwBG ends so abruptly that users downloading bootlegged copies think they've been cheated
out of an ending (which, when you think about it, is truly ironic). Maybe Guzman just ran out of
ideas, which is why the film is padded with a closing credit sequence featuring a title card
identifying even the smallest bit player (and allowing a last look at the attributes of those hired
solely for their bust size).
NNwBG was clearly designed as a first chapter in a series, with
Sister Sarah continuing to fight the good fight against ever more skilled and determined foes sent after
her by the gangster-priests. I don't think I want to find out what Guzman has in mind to top
himself.
Nude Nuns With Big Guns Blu-ray, Video Quality
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.
Nude Nuns With Big Guns Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation
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.
