Immagini di un convento — Sexually Active Nuns

The '70s were a cinematic cesspool of broken taboos, a ramification of unhinging American filmmakers from the Production Code in 1968, and finally loosening the noose of censorship that plagued filmmakers who desired to explore risqué subject matter. Pushing the limits was not special to America, although other cultures went about it in their own ways. Despite their inventing genres such as the spaghetti western and the giallo thriller, Italy was renowned as much for its trailblazing as it was for its plagiarizing. Some filmmakers in Italy, for instance, notoriously and unabashedly stole from the current trends, taking a hit such as Dawn of the Dead, which was renamed Zombie in Italy, and producing a name-in-only sequel titled Zombie 2 under the eye-popping direction of Lucio Fulci (that's a story itself, which eventually leads to a film being a sequel to itself). Nonetheless, it cannot be disputed that Italy was the first to popularize undressing a nun for sheer tantalizing profitability, thus declaring them the mavericks of nunsploitation, a genre practiced today by the creatively strapped gonzo pornographers in their basements with Halloween costumes. But Italy did it first and did it right. Their films dripped with the authenticity of historically ripped scenarios and shot-on-location environments. Even if the film offered no redeeming quality in its plot, it'd still be placed in an abandoned, majestic, palatial convent, inevitably leaving a viewer to ponder the amount of spiritual harm endured for the cast and crew. After all, is it worth risking Hell just to make a movie about demon-possessed lesbian nuns? For such moral guidance, the last person you'd want to ask was the director of Immagini di un convento (translated into Images in a convent), Joe D'Amato (born Aristide Massaccesi in 1936), who amassed a ridiculous 196 films in less than thirty years of being professionally active. And whose nihilistic, anarchistic everyday perspective gave him the freedom to pursue any project regardless of its tastefulness. His rate of churning out films was so rapid that almost ten after his death, scripts and films credited to his unrecognized pseudonyms are still being discovered as D'Amato's work. His 1979 venture into the nunsploitation racket, Immagini di un convento, is as much of a knockoff of Walerian Borowczyk's Interno di un convento (Behind Convent Walls) as Fulci's Zombie 2 is "inspired" by Romero's Dawn of the Dead (I mean no disresepct to the late Fulci by stating these facts). Immagini di un convento's content is no less diluted by its second-rate status, however, as it manages to unmercifully torture any Catholic's sacred beliefs until it declares itself as blasphemy and a tool of Satan. Its plot is wafer-thin: a mysterious demon assuming human flesh enters a convent and through his unholy persuasion, riles the occupants and some passersby into a sexual whirlwind. Eventually, someone notices that nuns don't normally fornicate, and a priest, noticing the breakdown of acceptable behavior, unsuccessfully performs an exorcism. The end. Immagini di un convento regularly drifts between levels of pornography, occasionally venturing into hardcore while leaving others soft, even when the "interaction" is related. For example, while a consensual heterosexual encounter between a nun and a man remains relatively far from explicit, D'Amato's camera captures a violent rape of a nun in plenty of unflinching, glaring depravity. Is Immagini di un convento D'Amato implying that the moral elitism prevalent in organized religion is a farce? That a priest or a nun must repress the same ungodly urges that tempt a common man and have no right to ascend to such righteous heights? Are we all just demoms fruitlessly aspiring to be good? Before answering, you should keep in mind that he made three movies in 1979 alone, which probably wouldn't have allowed him to put much, if any, thought besides which angle is best to shoot a woman's ass.