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| Nude Nuns with Big Guns | |
| Image // Unrated // $29.97 // February 14, 2012 | |
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| Review by Adam Tyner | posted January 29, 2012 |
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I've been walking around with this Blu-ray disc for, like, four days now, and I still crack up every time I look at that artwork. Great tagline. Even better title. In the running for Cover of the Year. Uh, too bad about the movie, though.
In this grueling economy, even the Catholic Church has gotta start thinking about alternative revenue streams if they want to keep the lights on. This one church on the outskirts of the desert has come up with a pretty clever scheme: cocaine. They've got the perfect cover. All those nuns they've got make for a pretty ideal workforce. They even have all the right connections courtesy of the Los Muertos biker gang. 'sjust that Sister Sarah (Asun Ortega) decides she wants to wet her beak a little (I guess? this point's not really made clear). Holding out on the Los Muertos gets most of her sisters slaughtered, and Sarah herself gets passed around by the gang as a doped-up cum dumpster. Turns out a
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Nude Nuns with Big Guns has its heart in the right place...or as right a place as a gloriously sleazy flick with a title like that can have it, I guess. In the first few minutes alone, you get a shameless ripoff of the Planet Terror theme from Grindhouse, a roomful of nuns wearing habits and nothin' else cutting up coke, and stylized freeze-frame cards straight outta The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The idea of a broad who's pumped full of heroin and forced into prostitution is right out of the Thriller: A Cruel Picture playbook, all the way down to her gun-toting revenge. That's not even getting to the bad-ass biker gang, the Taxi Driver-inspired climax, or the fact that the flick's incapable of going more than a couple of minutes without a nude scene or a rape. Seriously, I can't think of the last movie I've seen outside of Cinemax After Dark with this much nudity, and not that I'm even a little bit into rape or anything, but I think Nude Nuns with Big Guns is some kind of record holder there too. I mean, most vintage exploitation flicks might have a cacklingly brilliant title and really great poster art, but there'd be maybe six or seven minutes of good stuff surrounded by seventy-something minutes of complete boredom. Nude Nuns with Big Guns doesn't just deliver just about everything you'd expect out of that title; it never stops delivering, so you're lookin' at an hour and a half straight of sex, drugs, and big-ass guns.
...and yet I'm sitting here scowling right now. See, the problem is that Nude Nuns with Big Guns is a title in search of a movie. It doesn't feel like anyone on either side of the camera is really having any fun, and even with all the tits and gunplay that get heaped on, it just feels
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Maybe right about now you're thinking that I'm completely missing the point. It's called Nude Nuns with Big Guns, after all. Who gives a shit about craftsmanship or characterization or what-the-fuck-ever in a movie paying homage to the 42nd St. crowd? Are there nekkid nuns packing heat: yes or no? I waltzed into Nude Nuns with Big Guns expecting something deliriously over-the-top like last year's super-brilliant Hobo with a Shotgun, and instead I wound up with something a lot closer to...he types with a shudder...Hell Ride. The whole thing is kind of joyless and repetitive. It plays like a cover band that can barely string together a couple of power chords, and yet they hit the studio and record a screeching medley of a bunch of their favorite songs anyway. Wow, so I kind of ran that into the ground. A sense of humor every once in a while pokes its heads out of the ground but dives back in to make room for more rape. Despite all the shit that's going on, the pacing winds up feeling choppy and wildly uneven anyway. There might be a twenty or thirty minute short here, but it really shouldn't have been dragged out to an hour and a half. I guess I'm just about done here, so I'll sum it up with this. Nude Nuns with Big Guns: amazing title; borderline-unwatchable movie. Skip It.
Video
I don't really go for that distractingly digital look that Nude Nuns with Big Guns opts for, but on the strictly technical end of things or whatever, this Blu-ray disc does pretty well for itself. The image is consistently crisp and clear and all that. The palette alternates between heavily stylized and blandly sunbaked, and it comes through about as well as it can. Despite an anemic-and-then-some bitrate -- its AVC encode and lossless audio don't even break the 15 gig mark -- I couldn't spot any hiccups in the compression. I did spot a couple instances of posterization, such as when Sister Bleedin'-Like-a-Stuck-Pig Sarah starts wobbling in and out of consciousness, but that's not really worth griping about. Totally okay for what it is.
Audio
Nude Nuns with Big Guns is packing a 16-bit, 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, and it's...yeah, kind of a mess. For one, the volume's really low, especially compared to the stuff that blares over the main menu. The
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No dubs or alternate mixes this time around. Subtitles are limited to English (SDH) and Spanish.
Extras
- Short Film (5 min.; SD): Taking a couple more cues from Grindhouse, this short has been digitally beaten and battered to look like it was shot on a Bell & Howell back in some dingy motel room in 1982 or something. It's basically The Motel Scene™ from Nude Nuns with Big Guns, featuring some of the same cast members from the movie but in different roles. I guess this was a dry run of seeing how the idea would play on film...or video or whatever.
- Trailer (2 min.; HD): ...and the only other thing on here is a high-def trailer.
The Final Word
Nude Nuns with Big Guns! That deserves some kind of Exploitation Throwback Title of the Decade championship belt or something. Even though the flick heaps on all the sleaze you'd expect out of a title like that and then some, the whole thing just feels really sloppy and not nearly as much fun as it oughtta be. Skip It.