After having a brain tumor removed, Sister Gertrude (Anita Ekberg, The French Sex Murders) hasn’t been the same. She thinks she still has cancer and cries out for a syringe filled with sweet, sweet morphine. At the psych ward where she works, the staff doctors (with Andy Warhol fixture Joe Dallesandro as a newbie M.D.) assure her that her thoughts are simply stress-induced and psychosomatic, so her jonesin’ for smack is misguided. However, out of lesbian love, Gertrude’s much-younger roomie, Sister Mathieu (Paola Morra, already a nunsploitation vet with Walerian Borowczyk’s Behind Convent Walls), procures her the fixes she desires.
Gertrude’s bad behavior hardly ends there. First, she becomes so revolted by a patient’s dentures, she crushes them under her foot. This escalates to stealing from patients, and going into town dressed all slutty to sell the fenced jewelry and then copulate with a complete stranger. As the Killer Nun title promises, worst among all her sins is murdering a few patients, most notably in a cringing scene of extreme acupuncture; those with an aversion to ocular trauma, you have been warned.
In his second and final feature as director, Giulio Berruti (who edited and helped script 1973’s Baba Yaga) weaves a wavering hallucinatory narrative of a nun on the run from her own demons. It’s not an indictment of the Catholic Church, but rather an anti-drug tale, however bizarre a route it takes. There’s nothing flashy to it, and it just kind of ends, but if you’re going to dip your toe in the nunsploitation waters, you may as well start here … unless it’s graphic nudity and sexuality you’re after, because this one is rather tame compared to its sisters. If that’s the case, venture elsewhere.
Ekberg couldn’t have been happy having to don habit in a cheap Euroshocker several leagues below fountain-frolicking for Fellini, but Berruti has nothing to be ashamed of, beyond Killer Nun’s hokey title. While not high art, the movie never was meant to be; as a B-level thriller with blood on the brain, it works — perhaps as comforting as palms wrapped in rosary beads. —Rod Lott