OFF THE WIRE
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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lotta guys will pay a lotta money to fuck a nun. Doesn't last for too long, though. Sister Sarah gets some new marching orders directly from the big man Himself, and she strikes down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempted to poison and destroy her sisters. In other words...? Nude nuns with big guns! 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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so...workmanlike. The best sight gags -- a half-battalion of more-or-less nude nuns cutting drugs a la American Gangster; Sarah lugging around a Tommy gun -- bookend the movie. There are only a couple of real rampages. Otherwise, someone will just pull out a pistol, and there'll be a tiny digital bullet hole that someone painted on a PC in his bedroom. I was hoping for something a lot more demented and splattery, and instead I got cigarette burns. Nude Nuns with Big Guns doesn't give me much of a reason to give a shit about Sister Sarah. All vengeance; no character and no charisma or anything. The badniks are mostly routine, including head honcho Chavo (David Castro). Only Xango Henry as über-ripped Los Muertos right-hand-man Kickstand makes much of an impression. There's not much of a sense of style...just whatever they're sloppily trying to ape from more worthwhile movies, and the overreliance on digital zooms in particular gets really old, really quickly. It kind of reeks of I-torrented-Final-Cut-Pro-and-kind-of-know-how-to-work-a-camera-so-let's-make-a-movie! I mean, there's low-budget, there's even-lower-budget, and then there's this. Even with all the nudity and lesbianism and stuff, Nude Nuns with Big Guns gets to be kinda tedious, especially the sheer what-the-fuck volume of long, long rape scenes.
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.
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.
