L’altro inferno [The Other Hell] (1981)

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2022) In theory, I’m a good sport for some giallo-era nunsploitation. Throw in direction from Bruno Mattei and a soundtrack from Goblin, and The Other Hell should be a lot more fun to watch than it is. I mean: how can it miss with supernatural nun-on-nun violence, a disfigured child with telekinetic powers, reanimated corpses and a Satanist going undercover as a nun? But it takes more than strong ideas to make a film worth watching, and so The Other Hell ends up far more boring than you’d expect—it takes a while for everything to get going, and the lower-budget aesthetics of the film (despite having been shot in a real convent) obscure and cheapen most of what should be effective. Little of this should come as a surprise if you’re aware of the production’s pedigree—Mattei and his producers weren’t just about exploitation, but derivative exploitation, and the result is rather terrible even with some intriguing keywords in its description. The Other Hell seems perfectly content to go for the dullest possible execution of its “ideas”—there’s no eroticism here, for instance, and far less outright horror than you’d suppose. It ends up being a frustrating film more than a boring one: you keep hoping that it will do justice to its ideas, and it ultimately doesn’t.