Jean-Paul Satre once said "The Other Hell is a half-arsed Bruno Mattei film." He was wrong, because all Bruno Mattei films are half-arsed, but most are entertaining. The Other Hell doesn't even FEEL like a half-arsed Bruno Mattei film, and that's where it doesn't quite work.
In an unspecified year that starts of like its the middle ages but slowly becomes clear its the 20th Century, a badly-acting nun is working on the corpse of another nun and gibbering about how the genitals are the gateway to the devil to another, more sane nun. The crazy nun then stabs the corpse in the fanny and removes said sinful genitals before going nuts and killing the other nun.
For some reason this doesn't go down too well with the local bishop (Tom Felleghy), so he sends a priest out there to the convent to check out what's happening. His answer to things is to exorcise the entire building, but the shifty Mother Superior won't let him in the attic, where a masked nun dwells. This priest's methods of 'having a good old pray' don't seem to work as weird stuff keeps happening, so the bishop then brings in a young hip priest (Carlo De Mejo) to sort things out.
Carlo is a modern priest who claims God's greatest gift to man was a brain, and he therefore is looking for a logical reason why things are a bit mad in the old nunnery. What can he find logical in bibles going on fire, nuns suffering from stigmata, and the murders of various nuns? When the other priest gets turned into a tandoori dish by a fireplace, Carlo grabs his trusty video camera and seeks to find out the truth...
You'd think a supernatural nunsploitation film made by Bruno Mattei would be a blast, but I swear the first half of the film limps all over the place before settling on some sort of plot. There's all sort of demonic goings on from Franco Garofolo being attacked by dogs to a baby being thrown in a boiling pot of water, it's just a shame that there's no real concrete backdrop to hang all these images on. The acting is truly atrocious from all and sundry, except maybe Garofolo, who could give Klaus Kinski as run for his money in the googly eye department.
I didn't hate the film, I just feel that it could have been much more than it was. Not sure what went wrong here. I read somewhere that actor Garofolo refused to kill a chicken for a certain scene, and Mattei had to do it himself. How many chickens have died in the name of devil worship films?
