#suor omicidi 1979

[saturnidaes]

The Killer Nun (1979)

[maspen15]

the killer nun ⁉️

[image description: a drawing of sister mathieu from the killer nun (1979). she is dressed in creamy white robes. she stands in the middle of a fiery background, as if she's in hell. her face has an intense expression. blood has stained the side of her robes, and some is splattered on her face too. she holds a fancy looking bloody candlestick tightly in both of her hands. end image description.]

[fettesans]

Top, screen capture from Killer Nun (Suor Omicidi), directed by Giulio Berruti, 1979. Bottom, Xandra Ibarra, Free To Those Who Deserve It (series), 2020, silicone, jewelry, syringe needles, clarinet ligature, tent stake, vise, pigment, dimensions variable. Via.

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There was a time when irony was supposed to have died—when Americans, frightened and weary, worried that the world had robbed them of their constitutional right to laughter. They needn’t have fretted: Irony—satire—political discourse that operates through the productive hedge of the joke—have not only evaded death in past decades; they have, instead, been enjoying a renaissance. Jokes have informed many prominent, though certainly not all, political protests; they have also, more broadly, come to shape the way people understand the world around them. Many Americans get their news filtered through late-night comedy and their outrages filtered through Saturday Night Live. They—we—turn to memes to express both indignation and joy. Jokes, in other words, with their charms and their appealing self-effacement and their plausible deniability (just kidding!), are helping people to do the messy work of democracy: to engage, to argue, and, every once in a while, to launch a successful bid for the presidency of the United States.

Scrolling through Instagram to see the pictures from the March for Science, I marveled at the protest’s display of teasing American wit. (“Remember polio? No? Thanks, science!”) And then I thought of Neil Postman, the professor and the critic and the man who, via his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, argued preemptively against all this change-via-chuckle. Postman wasn’t, as his book’s title might suggest, a humorless scold in the classic way—Amusing Ourselves to Death is, as polemics go, darkly funny—but he was deeply suspicious of jokes themselves, especially when they come with an agenda. (...)

Postman today is best remembered as a critic of television: That’s the medium he directly blamed, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, for what he termed Americans’ “vast descent into triviality,” and the technology he saw as both the cause and the outcome of a culture that privileged entertainment above all else. But Postman was a critic of more than TV alone. He mistrusted entertainment, not as a situation but as a political tool; he worried that Americans’ great capacity for distraction had compromised their ability to think, and to want, for themselves. He resented the tyranny of the lol. His great observation, and his great warning, was a newly relevant kind of bummer: There are dangers that can come with having too much fun. (...)

Postman was a postmodernist who was uniquely suspicious of postmodern thought, and he worried, as Daniel Boorstin had before him, that our images had come unmoored from our fuller realities—and that people, being tied to them, were similarly adrift. He saw a world in which Americans were made pliant and complacent because of their cravings for distraction. He knew that despots often used amusement to soften and systematize their seizings of power. He worried that television—an environment where facts and fictions swirl in the same space, cheerfully disconnected from the world’s real and hard truths—would beget a world in which truth itself was destabilized. “In a print culture,” he argued, “writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don’t notice, or even worse, don’t care.”

Megan Garber, from Are We Having Too Much Fun?, for The Atlantic, April 27, 2017.

[title777]

Anita Ekberg

watched:

to watch:

Screaming Mimi 1958

La dolce vita 1960

Boccaccio '70 1962

Call Me Bwana 1963

4 for Texas 1963

Come imparai ad amare le donne 1966

Malenka 1969

Casa d'appuntamento 1972

Suor Omicidi 1979

[memoriastoica]

Killer Nun (1979)

[letterboxd-loggd]

Killer Nun (Suor Omicidi) (The Killer Nun) (1979) Giulio Berruti

August 7th 2022

[lifejustgotawkward]

Anita Ekberg in The Killer Nun (1979, dir. Giulio Berruti).

[musidoro]

SUOR OMICIDI (1979), directed by Giulio Berruti.

[74domg]

Killer Nun (Suor Omicidi), dir Giulio Berruti, 1979

[saturnidaes]

Paola Morra as Sister Mathieu (1979)

[movies-ive-watched]

The Killer Nun (1979) , aka Killer Nun

Suor Omicidi (original title)

[elcinelateleymickyandonie]

Anita Ekberg  α: 29 de septiembre de 1931 Ω:11 de enero de 2015

Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg ( del 29 de septiembre de 1931 al 11 de enero de 2015) fue una actriz italiana nacida en Suecia en películas estadounidenses y europeas. Ella es mejor conocida por su papel de Sylvia en la película de Federico Fellini La Dolce Vita (1960). Ekberg trabajó principalmente en Italia, donde se convirtió en residente permanente en 1964. Fue la sexta de los ocho hijos de Gustav Fredrik Ekberg y Alva Maria Larsson. En su adolescencia trabajó como modelo de moda. En 1950 acudió al concurso de Miss Malmö, a instancias de su madre, quien la llevó al concurso de Miss Suecia, que ganó. Posteriormente fue a los Estados Unidos para competir por el título de Miss Universo 1951 (un concurso que entonces no era oficial, ya que no pasó a serlo hasta 1952), pese a que apenas hablaba el inglés.

FILMOGRAFIA 1953 Abbott and Costello Go to Mars 1953 The Golden Blade 1955 Blood Alley 1955 Artistas y modelos 1955 Guerra y paz 1956 Back from Eternity 1956 Loco por Anita 1956 Man in the Vault 1956 Zarak 1957 Interpol 1957 Valerie 1958 Paris Holiday 1958 The Man Inside 1958 The Screaming Mimi 1959 Nel Segno di Roma 1960 La dolce vita 1961 Behind Closed Doors 1961 The Dam on the Yellow River 1962 Boccaccio 70 1962 Seven Seas to Calais 1963 Call Me Bwana 1963 Cuatro tíos de Texas 1965 The Alphabet Murders 1965 Who Wants to Sleep? 1966 How I Learned to Love Women 1966 Way...Way Out 1966 Pardon, Are You for or Against? 1967 The Glass Sphinx 1967 Sette volte donna 1967 El Cobra 1969 Death Knocks Twice 1969 Malenka, la sobrina del vampiro (también conocida como Fangs of the Living Dead 1970 I clowns 1970 The Divorce 1972 The French Sex Murders 1972 Northeast of Seoul 1978 Killer Nun (también conocida como Suor Omicidi o Deadly Habits) 1979 Gold of the Amazon Women 1987 Intervista 1996 Bámbola

[saturnidaes]

[title777]

Joe Dallesandro

watched:

to watch:

Flesh 1968

Trash 1970

Flesh for Frankenstein 1973

Heat 1972

Sangue per Dracula 1974

Donna è bello 1974

The Gardener 1974

L'ambizioso 1975

Fango bollente 1975

Il tempo degli assassini 1975

Je t'aime moi non plus 1976

La marge 1976

L'ultima volta 1976

Suor Omicidi 1979

Merry-Go-Round 1980

Vacanze per un massacro 1980

Double Revenge 1988

[lifejustgotawkward]

Anita Ekberg in The Killer Nun (1979, dir. Giulio Berruti).

[lifejustgotawkward]

365 Day Movie Challenge (2017) - #323: The Killer Nun (aka Killer Nun or Suor Omicidi) - dir. Giulio Berruti

You probably can’t call yourself a true horror movie buff until you’ve seen The Killer Nun. I don’t mean to make it sound like a good experience; it has a bizarre plot, subpar acting, atrocious dubbing and the usual schlocky requirements of titillating sex and bloody violence. Still, if you’re going to watch an example of nunsploitation (yes, that’s real), it might as well be a film starring Anita Ekberg.

With La Dolce Vita’s fountain-wading days long behind her, a middle-aged but still striking Ekberg plays Sister Gertrude, a nun in a Belgian convent who has recently undergone an operation for a brain tumor. Still in pain from the cancer/surgery and paranoid that the malignant growth has not been successfully removed (or that if it is gone it will soon return), Gertrude numbs herself with morphine injections. As if the drug addiction weren’t enough, the naughty nun also takes a train trip into a nearby city - are nuns usually allowed to leave the convent in street clothes at a moment’s whim? - and has a quickie with a guy whom she picks up in a café. We later learn from Gertrude herself that she has quite a lengthy sexual history for a monastic woman.

And still, the heterosexual sex, illegal narcotics and lurking tumors are not enough for this film. As the title implies, some killing takes place too. Patients in the convent’s hospital are systematically murdered, seemingly by Gertrude in fits of hysterical rage. Gertrude’s roommate, Sister Mathieu (Paola Morra), tries to “help” Gertrude by hiding anything she finds at the crime scenes, like bloody evidence. Mathieu does this out of love for Gertrude, who at first rebuffs the younger nun’s advances but then turns the tables on Mathieu by bullying her into having sex with her. (Why did Gertrude suddenly become so mean to someone who only wanted to make her happy? Not sure.) If you’re hoping that The Killer Nun will make good on its promise of sexy lesbian nun action, you’re out of luck: the would-be-sex scene ends before the activity can begin. (In an interview with director Giulio Berruti on the DVD, he said he did this because he had a great affection for Anita Ekberg and he wanted to spare her the so-called embarrassment of acting out the lesbian sex scene. I’m not sure why he thought that would have been so much more uncomfortable for her than the definitely undignified sex scene with the male stranger, but whatever.)

I haven’t even mentioned the most interesting supporting actors yet. Berruti somehow managed to get Alida Valli to appear as the Mother Superior, Lou Castel to play as a paralyzed patient who is attacked by Ekberg and the Joe Dallesandro as - get this - a doctor. Valli’s role is a mere cameo in a couple of scenes that probably last only a minute altogether, while Castel puts way too much energy into a thankless role for which the sole highlight is his attempt to crawl up a flight of basement steps. Dallesandro, easily one of the best-looking actors in movies of the 1960s and 70s, might have at least been enjoyable if his glorious Noo Yawk accent could have been heard, but tragically he is dubbed here so that the character can sound generically American. Boo! I want Dr. Joe Dallesandro to sound like he got his medical degree(s) at SUNY Downstate, not Johns Hopkins.

It’s hard to overlook The Killer Nun’s flaws when they glare so blatantly. For a product of the horror genre, there are not nearly as many scenes of gore as you would expect. I would almost say that the film barely qualifies as horror, instead feeling more like a psychological drama minus a lot of the required intensity. (How can a narrative that runs less than an hour and a half contain so many boring sequences? Yikes.) Besides, I think it takes half an hour before the first murder occurs, which is an oddly long time to wait for such a thing in a slasher story. Plus the aforementioned dubbing issues give the film an artificiality that drains the performances of whatever stronger impressions they could have left; for me, dubbing was only fun when Doris Wishman did it. In fact, The Killer Nun’s dubbing is inserted so amateurishly that in one scene toward the end, the film actually reverts to the original Italian language with subtitles! Maybe it’s just a funny mishap for this mistake to have made its way into the print used for the DVD, but it says something about either the original theatrical release of The Killer Nun or the American company (Blue Underground) that packaged it for the home entertainment market that no one could bother to fix that kind of error.

In fairness, however, The Killer Nun does have one good thing going for it: Antonio Maccoppi‘s cinematography is quite good for an exploitation flick that probably didn’t have much of a budget. I don’t know whether he or Giulio Berruti is responsible for how shots were framed, but I was impressed by the artistry. The camerawork also takes care to photograph close-ups of Anita Ekberg with a particular focus on her bold blue eyes, so I appreciate that as well.