THE OTHER HELL

(L'Altro Inferno)
1980 Bruno Mattei Italy
Starring: Franca Stoppi, Carlo De Mejo, Franco Garafolo, Francesca Carmeno, Susan Forget


what a fucking movie! it's nuns gone nuts in Bruno Mattei's first team up with hack moron scribe Claudio Fragasso.

opening with a loooong scene of a young nun wandering through the dark and spooky catacombs beneath a convent, THE OTHER HELL doesn't waste any time (okay, so it does) getting to the action. one nun embalms another, ranting about the usual nun stuff-hell, sex, loose virtues ect. she then tells us that the vagina is "the other hell"...nice one Claudio. then she repeatedly rams a knife up the corpse's twat. hehehe.

it seems there's been an outbreak of murders at the convent. a preist is sent to investigate, but all those damn exploding lightbulbs scare him off. next, a preist/detective (Carlo De Mejo) is sent in to get to the bottom of things.

mother superior (Buio Omega's Franca Stoppi) acts quite suspicious-probably because her deformed telekenetic daughter fathered by satan lives upstairs-oops, getting ahead of myself there.

the murders continue, and De Mejo gets little help from the secretive nuns. hilariously, De Mejo goes Maurizio Merli on the sisters, roughin' 'em up and tearing up their rooms.

De Mejo is convinced that there is a rational explaination to the goings on, but we know better 'cause satan keeps popping up and killing people. oh that satan. i guess i would be pissed off if i was a paper mache' mask with lightbulb eyes.

De Mejo eventually gets to the bottom of things in one of the most insane climaxes in all of filmdom. Fragrasso's script rips off every horror film ever made in about 3 minutes. in flashback we learn that Franca Stoppi knocked da boots with splitfoot and gave birth to a baby. the baby was then promptly boiled slightly by another nun. the baby lived however, and now grown up, has a crush on Carlo De Mejo. who could blame her? those rugged good looks, the macho beard. so mother and daughter, torn apart by a forbidden love, square off-and the viewer's head explodes as they try to make sense of it all.

as we all know, Signore Mattei can't touch anything without it being goofy in some way. some sort of twisted Midus touch i guess. well, this applies to THE OTHER HELL just the same, but there are some suitably creepy moments, and a few "BOO!" type scares. Mattei's sleazy camera work fits the story well, as does the once again lifted Goblin music-this time mostly from BUIO OMEGA.

watch out for Frank Garfield/Franco Grofolo (Hell Of The Living Dead) in a small part as a gardener who gets eaten by his own dogs.

****

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