FILM GUTTER REVIEWS: NUDE NUNS WITH BIG GUNS (2010)

Dir. Joseph Guzman, USA, 91 mins

Now there's a title, eh? On one of my regular browses of the forward schedule on Horror Channel UK this one certainly leapt out aplenty, and equally had the ring of the kind of movie worthy of the Film Gutter treatment. Admittedly it's been sat on the recordings list for a while, but we got to it in the end, eh? Made on a pretty slim $85,000 dollars, this one really screamed grindhouse, which is a genre that can throw up some good movies on a real shoestring. It can also be a subgenre that is pretty hit and miss – so would this particular slice of nunsploitation be heavenly or hellish?
 
Nude Nuns with Big Guns follows the story of Sister Sarah, a nun who finds herself kidnapped and forced into a life of drug abuse and prostitution after a horrible incident on a lonely road. When she does finally make her escape and get her act together, she only has one thing on her mind – vengeance, and she's more than happy to throw away old habits – in more ways than one – in order to get it. Her 'revenge list' includes the biker gang of the local crime lynchpin Chavo, as well as many of her brothers and sisters of the cloth implicit in her nightmarish ordeal.
 
The premise of this one sounds like it should be plenty entertaining, with lots of of opportunity to play with the idea or religion in what could have been a fun way, as well as having plenty of action to go along with it. Unfortunately this movie never really delivers on the promise of a cracking title, and you can't help but wonder whether the moniker for this one actually came before the plot, characterisation or anything else you would typically expect in a film. I can't claim to be a true grindhouse expert, or even a massive fan of the subgenre, but this one didn't match up to movies in the patch I had heartily enjoyed such as Hobo With a Shotgun and Pervert!. The storyline simply didn't feel organic, and all the way there were too many laboured attempts to add style and make an effort to leap out from the crowd. With the aforementioned movies the plots were nothing revelatory, but they were allowed to stand on their two feet and generally were done really well, as well as having a strong element of fun. Nude Nuns just feels far too slim, and tries too hard to make up for many of its shortcomings with vapid visual and sound touches that are, to quote The Bard, 'all sound and fury, signifying nothing'.
 
Who said you can't quote Shakespeare when exploring extreme horror? Ooh, must do Tromeo and Juliet at some point...
 
Anyway, this was a film that I was looking forward to that just seemed to fall flat for me. It has all the shape of a good piece of grindhouse, but not enough of the substance – and a few titillating lesbian scenes are simply not enough to fix that.
 
RATING: 2.5/10. A fun title is about the best thing going for this movie, as it's rather messy from the plot perspective, has very few memorable characters and tries to ladle on flashy touches that are just basically throwing glitter on things in a way that doesn't disguise just how bland it is underneath. There's just a sense of the whole thing reaching all the way, and in the end it's not that big, funny or clever. Unless you're an absolutely obsessive viewer of grindhouse – as in you simply have to see everything – then I would say you could safely sit this one out. With a total 2.5/10, it's worth 'nun' of your time...