DVD Release
The Other Hell (1980)
R1 / NTSC DVD
Shreik Show / 2003
Director: Bruno Mattei
Writer: Claudio Fragasso, Bruno Mattei
Starring: Jeff Franca Stoppi, Carlo De Mejo
Review by Vaughn Drake
The Other Hell opens with shots of hundreds of skulls, piled high on alters of bones, and a nun making her way through the dark to a mad scientist looking laboratory, where another nun is embalming a corpse. Clearly there’s something wrong with the embalmer nun, and seconds later she rapes the corpse with her knife: jabbing the knife deep into the corpse’s vagina, laughing and calling her vagina “the other hell”. (Here’s the actual quote: “The genitals are the door to evil. The vagina, the labyrinth that leads to hell.”) The embalming nun kills the other nun because she sees some real bad devil special effects and stuffs the now dead nun into a casket that’s leaning against the wall of the lab.
Soon an older priest comes to exorcise the convent itself, and a little later a much younger bearded priest visits the convent to figure out a rash of suicides. The nuns believe the Devil is no longer in Hell, but in Heaven. Soon other nuns die, no one ever gets naked, there’s no trashing of limbs, we get no lesbian (or even straight) sex, and no upside down crucifixes.
What we do get (and in the long run, it’s relatively little), is seeing a chicken get its head cut off, a baby thrust into boiling water and a bunch dolls hanging by chains. Nothing interesting plot wise ever happens, and unless you’re a hardcore Brunno Mattie or nunsploitation fan, there’s nothing here worth watching.
I was never quite able to understand the point of The Other Hell. I get nunsploitation, I love nunsploitation, but this one left me feeling empty. No nudity, no lesbianism, no coherent storyline…no thanks. Stick to the genre classics like School of the Holy Beast and Satanico Pandemonium and the ultra non-pc nunsploitation epic, Wet & Rope.
