Bergonzelli does the convent
17 December 2009
This movie, while marketed under the relatively innocuous English title "Loves of the Nympho", may be the most insane of the many insane offerings of Italian director Sergio Bergonzelli, who was already making the kind irredeemable sleaze in the early 70's that his fellow countrymen like Joe D'Amato, Andreas Bianchi, and Bruno Mattei would be churning out by the end of the decade. This seems to be a kind of sequel to Bergonzelli's earlier "Cristiana, Student of Scandal" (at least, if the title character hadn't died at the end of that)with Toti Achilli taking over the role Malissa Longo originally played as a college-age, ridiculously promiscuous, micro mini-skirted minx.

When the film opens "Cristiana" is having sex on airplane, but not in the bathroom like a normal person--no, she's doing it right in coach(!) while her hedonistic friends cheer her on and the other passengers, including a couple nuns, look on embarrassed. But then the plane almost goes down in a rainstorm (in some hilarious model-airplane-in-a-bathroom-shower footage), and she repents her sinful ways to one of the nuns and promises to join a convent. When they end up surviving, she follows through on her promise, even though her society mother (Eva Czemerys) and her friends are dead-set against it. But, of course, if you've ever seen an Italian "nunsploitation" movie, you know there's no better place for a crazed nympho to be! Once in the convent she immediately has a lesbian affair with an older nun (Magda Konopfka). A male painter corners her in a bell tower and really rings HER bell. She then sneaks her boyfriend into the nunnery. I won't reveal the rest, but since this is a Sergio Bergonzelli film, you know it's going to swing wildly from screwball comedy to tragedy and back again.

This was not the first "naughty nun" movie. There had been several versions of the classic story "The Nuns of La Monza" (and the British film "Black Narcissus" could also be thrown in here). And these kind of stories really go back in literature to Bocaccio's "The Decameron". But what Bergonzelli did here was REALLY ladle on the sleaze (including a trippy fantasy sequence where Cristiana has sex with a psychedelic painted Jesus!). He really puts the "ploitation" in "nunsploitation". Anyway, to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, I wouldn't recommend this kind of unrepentantly sleazy, morally degenerate, sacrilegious trash to anyone, but it's always worked for me.
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