Directed by Gilberto Martínez Solares
Written by Jorge Barragan and Adolfo Martinez
Starring:
- Enrique Rocha as Luzbel / Lucifer
- Cecilia Pezet as Sister María
- Delia Magaña as Mother Superior
Rating: 
By the year 1975 the EuroSleaze praxis had already revealed a predilection for Nunsploitation, with Italian filmmakers emerging as the leading genre proponents. Anti-clerical sentiments, patriarchal indictment and institutional hypocrisy were reflected in one of the most outrageous and controversial exploitation film formats in the history of genre cinema. Naturally, sooner or later the nunsploitation phenomenon would enter into a diversification resulting from its, albeit divisive, inescapable appeal and inevitable popularity as a novel form of iconoclastic entertainment. This is where the Mexican film industry steps into this picture of mythological expansion. It may seem that Satanico Pandemonium, the first Mexican take on the sinful nun genre, has arrived too late to the sacrilegious revelry to predicate new sordid themes on an already well-established canon. However, it’s never too late to push the sleazy stuff to a new extreme – more concentrated, more contemplative and subjective. Many more nunsploitations would continue to be made throughout the libertine decade of the 70’s and would keep on making their blasphemous clamor right into the wacky 80’s. So something innovative must have been brought by this grotesquely stylish Mexican nunsploitation film helmed by Gilberto Martinez Solares to be hailed as an influential entry in the genre.
In a rather bucolic visual setting and a rather heavenly aural mood, we meet Sister Maria (Cecilia Pezet), a young nun blessed with a seraphic countenance and graceful mannerisms. The surrounding nature and her in the middle of it as immaculate ornamentation form a divine harmony that is soon tainted by an unseemly provocation of sexual desire and religious guilt. A naked man (Enrique Rocha) appears in front of a nonplussed but intrigued sister Maria, who first hesitates at this uncanny apparition and then flees like a terrified deer at the sight of her evil hunter. After this encounter swinging between the earthy and the unearthly, the pious Maria experiences for the first time in her religious life sinful sensations ranging from the erotic to full-blown depravity. Gilberto Martínez Solares’ austere direction does not succumb to cheap pornography, and although the sexy Cecilia Pezet is more often naked than clothed throughout the film, the solemn staging leans more toward the art of subtlety than the artlessness of the explicit. To begin with, this has to be one of the most magnificent renderings of the genre. Sweeping compositions being used as a contemplative canvas. The film looks absolutely gorgeous. However, outside of the artistic scope, Satanico Pandemonium possesses a solid foundation as a narrative film to pull off a tale of abstract nature and compelling subject matter without relying solely on its expressive shape. It’s a script with content, and a very good one. If most Euro nunsploitations have something in common, it is that they almost all deal with religious celibacy and its murderous implications in a specific realm, seldom suggesting a spirituality outside the conventual. Satanico Pandemonium deals with these same themes but in an unspecified domain; while Sister Maria’s inner conflicts materialize in defiant acts of sleaze, the storytelling ambiguity of the proceedings never assumes a logical or purely material realm. In limbo and eerie interplay of the otherworldly with the worldly, this nunsploitation is designed to be more of a theological examination than a secular deconstruction of Sister Mary’s haunted psyche.
The man Maria met outside the convent is just one of the many Luciferian manifestations she will have in the course of the movie. Featuring allusions to the Original Sin – a tasty, alluringly red apple as the object of desire, snakes as malicious provocation and carnal inspirations as lustful imagery – the story unravels with this dynamic of religious cryptology where our protagonist succumbs to sin even as she fights against it. A metaphorical reading of the diabolical phenomena as an instinctive expression of the human being for pleasure could be the easiest interpretation that can be applied to Satanic Pandemonium. The most challenging of these constructions would be to interpret its more critical edge as a piece of socio-political denouncement. Artfully, the at times hysterical and at others unpleasant portrait of human decadence, casts polemical insights into what I would say are the three primary sins of the Catholic Church, all of which have given it a negative historical reputation for moral hypocrisy and Christian contradictions. Inside the cavernous nunnery, where we witness the ascetic modus vivendi of the nuns of Satanic Pandemonium, we can perceive that these three crimes previously mentioned acquire relevance and material meaning. “Racism, pedophilia and homophobia,” the three pillars that solidly support the bad image of the religious institution. With graphic filth and stern surrealism, Gilberto Martínez Solares’ film depicts these three infamies in the most shocking way imaginable. We witness Sister Maria seducing a young boy and then trying to rape him; black nuns whose only job in the convent is as cleaners and cooks, in addition to being subjected to all kinds of racist abuse; and lastly, we have Sapphic enticements acted out guiltily and tastelessly. This brew of tawdry affairs has nothing cliché about it under the ever-sober direction of the Mexican director. It is an exploitation routine that exudes an air of seriousness rather than frivolity. And Ceclia Pezet, giving one of the most inspiring and unsettling performances in the kinky nun genre, is thoroughly committed to never breaking the aura of earnestness in this richly exploitative milieu. Watching her painfully wear a cilice in the form of a spiked belt, self-flagellating while doing penance is a whole act of nunsploitation iconography that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to erase from my mind.
When the unpreventable happens, and the blasphemy reaches its climax, the perception of what is real and what is not collapses into an aesthetic degradation of the sacred. By this point, the unspeakable deeds performed by a delirious Sister Maria deliver a subjective and mystifying twist, following a cold but provocatively witty open ending that I think is best left as such, unresolved and abstract. Whatever the hell is going on in that mindfuck of a finale, I’m sure that mischievous Lucifer has the answer with his last apparition, implying deliberate deception and trickery to conceal his most delectable sins that did indeed happen. But that’s just me guessing.
