Convent of the Sacred Beast

A Nunsploitation.Net review

Suzuki is an artist and delivers a movie that is beautifully filmed. He highlights the sharp, often conflicting contrasts of the seemingly orderly and chaste society within the convent. While they seem as simple as their black and white outfits (at one point in the film, a nun boasts that the colors symbolize life in a convent: white for chastity and black for aestheticism, or rather, their vow of poverty -- to live without worldly possessions), the inner conflicts and power struggles behind the cloistered walls are as complex, if not more so, than the world beyond the nunnery.

The director often contrasts order with chaos, beauty with ugliness. The nuns are frequently depicted lining up in neat little rows, standing in formation like soldiers. Yet the goings on within the convent are anything but orderly. Prejudice, nepotism, hypocrisy, and, of course, lesbianism run rampant.

In one of the most brutal torture scenes, a nun is stripped and then whipped with roses, the thorns tearing at her flesh. Yet, this ugly display of masochism is contrasted with the beauty of the shower of rose petals that ensues, and of the incomparable Yumi Takagawa, who portrays our heroine.

In the film, Maya (played by Takagawa in her film debut, who incidentally, takes her stage name from this character) joins the Sacred Heart Convent to find out what happened to her parents. She knows her mother was a nun at the convent who died shortly after (or perhaps during) her birth. The identity and whereabouts of her father, unknown.

Indoctrinated, Maya finds herself hurled in the midst of a complex power struggle between two castes of nuns, the higher ranking choir nuns whose wealthy families make regular, sizeable donations to the order, and the inferior assistant nuns who come from less fortunate backgrounds.

As a mysterious newcomer with her own secret agenda, Maya is soon ostracized and even accused of spying on her fellows for the abbess. Nevertheless, she uses the situation to her advantage and soon blackmails two lesbian nuns into helping recover records of her mother's death.

The deeper Maya digs, the closer to the truth she gets, but each subsequent answer is uglier than the last. The truth about her mother and father, she discovers, is more horrible than she could have imagined.

This film launched the career of popular actress Yumi Takagawa. She was duped into the sexually explicit and revealing role by a somewhat unscrupulous casting agent. The film however, helped her land roles more to her liking and as the beautiful young actress became more popular, School of the Holy Beast became more desirable as her only nude picture. This, in turn, lead to several theatrical and video re-releases, including this most recent DVD release from Cult Epics.

In typical Japanese style, the movie reminds us of the indelible scar Japan carries as the only nation in the world's history to suffer two atomic bombings.

The priest, Father Kakinuma is a survivor of the Nagasaki bombing and bears the scars of radiation exposure. Although Nagasaki was chosen as a target because of its military viability as a sea port, this role as port city made it home to many foreigners. As such, it was one of the first destinations for Catholic missionaries and many Japanese living there are Catholic. In bombing the city, the Allies attacked one of the isolationist country's few links to the West.

The disc offers two lengthy and worthwhile special features. The first is an interview with the still-beautiful Yumi Takagawa in which she relays stories of her casting and her outrage when she discovered the sexually explicit nature of the film.

The second feature is an interview with film critic Risaku Kiridoushi. He details the history of Japan's venture into sexploitation cinema and the Japanese take on religious commentary in film.

Both features are interesting and worthwhile, though it seems little effort was put into editing and filming them. Fans may find them a bit dull after being spoiled by the effort put into similar features on Mondo Macabro titles.

Overall, the film is perhaps one of the strongest of the genre. It strikes a chord with fans of exploitation films as well as those looking for a more a compelling story than is usually found in this type of fare. School of the Holy Beast comes with our strongest recommendation.

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Recommendation: Nunsploitation.net suggests that fans of this genre try the movie Wet and Rope.

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