Killer Nun
| Killer Nun | |
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Original Italian poster
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| Directed by | Giulio Berruti |
| Produced by | Enzo Gallo |
| Written by | Giulio Berruti Alberto Tarallo |
| Starring | Anita Ekberg |
| Music by | Alessandro Alessandroni |
| Cinematography | Antonio Maccoppi |
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Release date
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Running time
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82 minutes |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Italian |
Killer Nun (also known as Suor Omicidi, or Deadly Habits) is a 1979 Italian nunsploitation film directed and co-written by Giulio Berruti and co-written by Alberto Tarallo. The film was originally banned in Britain as a 'video nasty' and released with cuts in 1993, but was finally released uncut on DVD in the UK during 2006, after changes in British censorship policy.
Killer Nun (1978) was produced in Italy. It features Anita Ekberg as Sister Gertrude, who is recovering from the removal of a brain tumor, although her Mother Superior (Alida Valli) dismisses Sister Gertrude's fears about a rushed recovery. Unfortunately, soon enough, it becomes clear that Sister Gertrude's fears were legitimate, as the hapless nun spirals into psychosis and addiction to morphine and heroin at the geriatric hospital where she works.
As well as initiating a lesbian affair with Sister Matthieu (Paola Morra), Sister Gertrude stomps on an elderly woman's dentures, reads gory hagiographic details of the lives of tortured saints to her hapless charges, goes into a nearby town, picks up a man at a bar, and has impersonal sex, then returns to the hospital and maneuvers to have concerned Dr Poirret (Massimo Serato) dismissed due to his age. A handsome new doctor, Dr. Patrick Roland (Joe Dallesandro), arrives and becomes suspicious of Sister Gertrude, after Sister Gertrude is accused of throwing an elderly man engaged in sex with a nurse out of a window, inflicts grueling calisthenics on elderly patients, and takes a patient's crutches, forcing him to crawl. Finally. the Mother Superior is convinced that she must do something about her aberrant behavior... but is Sister Gertrude really the perpetrator of murder, or is someone trying to frame her?
Killer Nun (Suor Omicidi) was an example of the nunsploitation genre, which centres on aberrant secularised behaviour from religious women. Unlike other examples of the genre, usually set in medieval or Renaissance locations, Killer Nun is firmly set in the present day, and has no pretensions to social commentary or any remarks about the role of women religious within the Church or the larger society. In the United Kingdom, Mary Whitehouse denounced it as one of the "video nasties" subgenre of violent horror cinema, which 'might' adversely affect human behaviour.
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