Directed by Giulio Berruti
Written by Giulio Berruti and Alberto Tarallo
Starring:
- Anita Ekberg as Sister Gertrude
- Joe Dallesandro as Dr. Patrick Roland
- Alida Valli as Mother Superior
- Massimo Serato as Dr. Poirret
- Paola Morra as Sister Mathieu
Release Date: May 10, 1979
Rating: 
Scabrous themes and spiritual implosions erupt throughout this ostensibly restrained yet still scandal-ridden specimen of the horny nun cycle—the sole Nunsploitation entry to earn a place on the notorious Video Nasties list. Which raises a perverse irony: how did the most restrained and tonally delicate of these convent shockers fall prey to the modern puritanical inquisition of censorship, while more brazenly blasphemous counterparts slipped through unscathed? Perhaps its singular audacity lies in centering a drug-dependent nun as tragic protagonist, a provocation that further agitated the reactionary anxieties of Thatcherite morality. Killer Nun bears not two but three indictments ensuring its damnation: the exploitative trinity of sex, violence, and narcotics.
Most films in the Nunsploitation racket lean on the old faithful duo: sex and violence. Killer Nun adds narcotics to the communion wine. Imagine the outrage brigade frothing: “A morphine-addicted bride of Christ? Unacceptable!” Anita Ekberg shooting up on screen wasn’t just provocative—it was cultural arson, and the censors smelled smoke immediately. Does it play the genre straight? Not exactly. Is it a stone-cold killer? Debatable. But by twisting exploitation’s usual anti-clerical cheap shots into a woozy, bloodstained tour of a nun’s unraveling mind, it lingers as a trash-stained, feverish, and hypnotic anomaly.
Forget crumbling abbeys and medieval paranoia—this time the sin festers inside a Catholic hospital for the elderly, soaked in modern-day bias. The relocation feels deliberate, a sharp pivot in setting, politics, and tone that reads like a sly genre shake-up by the makers of Killer Nun. While most Nunsploitation wallows in Renaissance decadence, this one plants its feet in contemporary Italy. At first it might seem like a practical shortcut, but the shift speaks to the cultural mood of the era—hence the drugs, not just as sleazy garnish but as the film’s distinctly modern toxin.
Swedish goddess Anita Ekberg, all icy glamour and barely contained madness, stars as Sister Gertrude, a nun unraveling after a fragile brain operation leaves her prone to breakdowns and violent mood swings. Her tyrannical flare-ups and twitchy paranoia poison the air of the dreary Catholic hospital for the elderly, turning patients against her as faith curdles into fear. The only soul orbiting her chaos is Sister Mathieu (Paola Morra), a submissive and sin-struck devotee burning with unreturned desire—her infatuation teetering between worship and obsession. As these classic genre wires spark into outright blasphemy, Giulio Berruti’s wild, eccentric direction digs deep into the suffocating torment of religious celibacy, the engine that drives Nunsploitation to its breaking point.
Giulio Berruti keeps the kitsch polished and the vulgarity coolly composed, while Anita Ekberg throws herself into a performance that’s gloriously, almost operatically histrionic. But beneath the lacquered surface lies a tangle of art-film pretension and grindhouse sensationalism that never quite commits to real sleaze. The pseudo-Freudian probing of the murderous subconscious feels labored, stacking up ambiguities that drain tension instead of building it. Gertrude thrashes between religious guilt and erotic delirium, her frenzy coded as both spiritual crisis and bodily hunger, yet the film refuses to decide whether her impulses are psychological pathology or theological damnation. Killer Nun aims for a baroque perversity, borrowing from giallo procedure until it swerves into an implausible whodunit finale. Infamous Video Nasty though it is, it startles but rarely enthralls.
