Bad habits die hard, with people flocking to see the latest nuns behaving badly flick. This is why Scan**lous Benedetta is a cinema win.
Boasting hot lesbian nuns and blasphemous sex with a wooden Virgin Mary icon, Benedetta was the sensational title that got tongues wagging at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
Picketed by Catholic protesters at its New York Film Festival premiere, it proves that nuns behaving badly still have the power to shock and – let’s be honest –
delight us.
Benedetta is the ‘true’ story of a 17th-century nun who falls in lust with a novice and declares that Jesus is telling her to bed her – and is a throwback to the glory days of the 1970s ‘nunsploitation’ era.
These are typically low-budget flicks set in a convent full of gorgeously made-up nuns whose repressed sexuality has found outlets in lesbianism, perversion and ‘mortifying of the flesh’.
There’ll likely be a sadistic Mother Superior (in Benedetta she is played by Charlotte Rampling) and a lecherous priest, while you can quite confidently expect the Spanish Inquisition (or another Satan-busting equivalent).
Most of the movies are pretty dire and low-rent but there are some arty iconic exceptions. Ken Russell’s The Devils, co-starring Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed, essentially set the mould and remained censored for decades due to a sensational scene involving a ginormous crucifix.
Like Benedetta, which is directed by Paul Verhoeven (Showgirls), the tone is deliberately and boldly provocative.
Mainly European, though there was a blossoming Japanese sub-genre, ‘nunsploitation’ was likely a reaction against the rise of feminism.
These sisters may be doing it to themselves (often in titillating, erotic soft-focus) but, as brides of Christ, their bodies should belong only to God.
On the big screen, naughty nuns in all their forms continue to obsess us.
There are the singing nuns in The Sound Of Music (1965) and Sister Act (1992). There are tame old-school British farces such as Nuns On The Run (1990), in which Robbie Coltrane and Eric Idle are cross-dressing convicts who hide out in a convent. There are also horror nuns, most recently via the demonic terror of 2016’s The Conjuring 2.
And there is the enduring ‘nuns and guns’ strain embodied by ’s machine gun-toting The Sister in Machete (2010).
Why the appeal? Is it the corruption of innocence? The inbuilt drama of an enclosed world order? Those fab monochrome outfits (and the fascination with what lies beneath)?
One thing’s certain, even as the number of nuns in the real world plummets, when it comes to nuns in the movies we aren’t about to kick the habit.
Benedetta is in cinemas now.
On screen naughty nuns throughout the ages
The Nun And The Devil 1973
A former Miss Great Britain stars in an otherwise typical Italian nunsploitation involving hot nuns plus massively overhyped amounts of actual nudity, lesbianism and torture.
Dark Habits 1983
Convent antics don’t come wilder than in Pedro Almodóvar’s dark Spanish comedy, where nuns indulge in LSD trips and lesbianism, and take coke with prostitutes.
The Sound Of Music 1965
Straying novice Maria chops up her curtains to make a tawdry dress, then seduces her boss with the aid of a yodelling wooden puppet – the guitar-strumming strumpet!
The Devils 1971
Vanessa Redgrave’s hunchbacked Sister Jeanne whips her sisters into a n**ed.n**ed satanic frenzy before Oliver Reed’s 17th-century priest in Ken Russell’s heavily censored cult classic.
