Satanico Pandemonium

A convent, somewhere, sometime in the 19th century. Sister Maria is devoted to God and beloved by the other nuns for this: Two facts that make her all the more a tempting target for Satan to corrupt.

He appears, in the form of a naked man, to Maria as she is out walking one day: "Good day, Sister". Shocked, Maria runs, then turns back once at a safe distance to find the man gone as suddenly as he had came.

Stopping at a roadside shrine to pray, Maria is startled by another voice: "Good day, Maria." This time, however, it is the village boy Marcello, with a newly born lamb. The symbolism hardly needs remarked upon.

As they walk along, Maria then sees the Devil's face reflected in a water trough. Turning round, she is confronted by the same man, now in shepherd's garb, who offers her an apple causing her to again flee. Again, the symbolism is obvious, and all the better for it.

The day's prayers impart an air of calm, though the Mother Superior's haranguing of the two black nuns who are preparing the evening repast alerts us that something is not quite right with the world, even prior to the Devil manifesting outside the window as Maria looks up. (Tellingly the black nuns eat their food separate from the rest.)

Later, Maria comforts the two black nuns as they pray alone. They must change their way of thinking now that they have taken their vows, she says. "My parents were slaves, I was born a slave. I'm tired of being mistreated," one replies. "I came to the convent to escape all that. But nothing's changed. I wish I'd never been born."

Back in her cell, Maria recalls the day's encounter. Pray as she might, she cannot shake it. Worse, the figure seems to be signalling her once more. She disrobes and ties a belt of thorns around her belly, wincing as they pierce her flesh, then scourges herself.

There is a knock at the door. It is the Mother Superior: One of the cows is unwell, so the dutiful Maria goes to tend to the animal. Curiously the bongo music that plays over the sequence suggests voodoo or other black magic more than Christian prayer and, sure enough, the Devil-man materialises once more, throw his apple in the direction of the half-dozing Maria.

Retuning to her cell, Maria finds herself confronted by one of the other sisters, who confesses to being madly in love with her 'virtue', 'depth' and 'purity', though the celerity with which she then moves to make more physical demonstrations cast doubts on the platonic side of things, before the Devil-man manifests in her stead…

The next day things only get worse. An unsettling sermon confirms how Satan can take many guises, with neither good nor evil evident from appearance alone. Then a grinning devil figure appears in place of the benign saint as Maria takes her turn at the altar…

And so it continues as Maria, ever more under Satan's influence, embarks on a campaign of seduction and murder, culminating in her ascension – with the Devil's help – to the position of Mother Superior and bacchanalian revels…

Though Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez may have borrowed the title for the character of the same name in their From Dusk Till Dawn, they would seem to have taken little else from this mid-1970s Mexican nunsploitation entry, itself taking inspiration from Ken Russell's crossover hit The Devils a few years earlier, with a soupcon of post-Exorcist attitude thrown in.

Like its close counterparts women in prison and Nazi concentration camp films, the "naughty nun" genre is one that allows filmmakers the opportunity for pure exploitation or heartfelt socio-political commentary, often in the same heartbeat: A lesbian encounter, for instance, can be read as a denunciation of authoritarian attitudes towards sex – the polymorphously perverse repressed will inevitably find a route to the surface, per your paperback Freud, or somesuch – or as a easy way to attract the predominantly male trash/sleaze audience.

Whatever individual filmmakers might claim, it's often difficult to resist the sense that the latter motive is the overwhelming one. How else to explain the seeming absurdity of running the commutation test and substituting nun with monk, the odd controversy-seeking curio like Antonia Bird's Priest only serving to further prove the point.

Satanico Pandemonium is, however, one of those entries – other examples would include Jess Franco's Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun, Walerian Borowczyk's Behind Convent Walls and Norifumu Suzuki's School of the Holy Beast – that manages to accommodate both tendencies more often than not.

What director Glberto Martinez Solares seems to recognise is the cumulative power of directorial restraint. While moments of hysterical shock are not lacking – the appearance of a snake in Maria's food via a jump cut actually gave me a little shock, something I thought I had been innoculated against by years of watching pretty much anything – their impact is heightened by an overall a mise-en-scene and production design that emphasise pictorial compositions and little signifying details in the interiors and the natural beauty of the world, verdant, bounteous and harmonious, in the exteriors.

Take, for example, the hallway outside Maria's cell in the convent, when seen by night and bathed in blocks of orange and blue light, the shadows of the ominpresent crosses on the walls falling in suggestively near-inverted patterns – from house of God to house of Satan.

Also central to the film's overall success is the air of ambiguity surrounding proceedings, with conventional signifiers of dream and reality largely absent. While the ending maybe feels a touch conventional and conformist initially – in the accompanying DVD interview the screenwriter attests as to how they had to tread carefully with the Mexican censors – the more one reflects on it, the more of a subversive piece with the whole it comes to feel.

Satanico Pandemonium also benefits from a great central performance from Cecilia Pezet, expertly conveying Maria's inner torments and alternately evoking feelings of pity, horror, emphathy and revulsion even within the scope of the same scene, as when she flagellates herself and moans modulate between those of pain and pleasure, shading from the first to the second.

What about the negatives, then? Well, there are a few: The use of synthesiser noises to accompany some of the shocks jars with the more traditional scoring elsewhere and doesn't come off. Some of the special effects are also a touch obvious, as when Maria stabs one victim and you can plainly see the blade of the stage knife going into the handle; here one doubts that case could be made for the film-makers conscious intent, in a 'laying bare the device' sort of way.

Mondo Macabro's Region 0 NTSC DVD presents Satanico Pandemonium in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1, in a new anamorphic transfer with the original Spanish audio and optional English subtitles.

With vibrant colours and plenty of detail, the film looks good for something of its vintage and budget, excepting of the last minute or so, where some print damage is evident. It's in no ways enough to ruin the viewing experience, more to make you wonder if maybe there were alternative endings shot.

The extras package comprises two featurettes; text essays on "naughty nun cinema" by Anthony Hartman of www.nunsploitation.netand director Gilberto Martinez Solares; a Mexican nunsploitation filmography; galleries of Mexican lobby cards (seven images) and Italian promotional artwork (ten images), and the now traditional trailer reel for other releases from the company.

The first featurette, The Devil Went Down to Mexico, presents an interview with Adolfo Martinez Solares, the film's screenwriter and the son of its director, Gilberto Martinez Solares, who discusses his father's astonishing career in general and the background to Satanico Pandemonium in particular.

Making his directorial debut in 1939, Gilberto directed over 160 films through to his last credit – aged 88 – in 1995, besides writing and occasionally being cinematographer and/or producer. Over the years he worked with el hombre lobo Lon Chaney Jr, the popular comedian Tintan and masked wrestler Santo, who provides for an amusing anecdote: One time Gilberto managed to recruit Santo and two rivals, who had never before appeared together on screen, for one of his spectaculars by the strategy of giving each wrestler a different script that presented him as the star while relegating the others to supporting roles. It worked, but made for some awkward moments when the deception came out during shooting.

As far as the film itself is concerned, Adolfo notes how it drew inspiration from Matthew Lewis's the monk, the gothic classic which Luis Bunuel had once hoped to adapt (it was finally brought to the screen by noted surrealist critic Ado Kyrou) but began as little more than a four page treatment which he agreed to develop free so long as his father could direct.

Realising the had to tread carefully on account of the film's potentially explosive subject matter, the father and son team played up the ambiguities of the film's mixed messages as and where appropriate, while still managing to sneak in some subversive moments like recruiting the the naked dancing nuns of Sister Maria's Last Supper from the high-class brothels that serviced Mexico's establishment.

The second featurette, House of the Writhing Nun, interviews Redemption Films supremo Nigel Wingrove on the nunsploitation genre, who outlines the background to and appeal of the form intercut with clips from a selection of representative titles including The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine, Alucarda and his own Visions of Ecstasy, famously refused a UK certificate in 1989 on grounds of blasphemy.

In sum, another worthwhile cult release.