Satanico Pandemonium

Satánico Pandemonium (1975), aka La sexorcista, directed by Gilberto Martínez Solares, remastered, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including original theatrical mono, commentary track, and English subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070636/

Video encoded in two-pass 9 500 kbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image.

English subtitles OCRed, proofed and corrected.

Note : Let's get started with some nunsploitation, shall we? In addition to being so controversial on its release in Mexico that it effectively ended the lead actress' career, this weird tale of a nun giving in to temptation by Satan himself of course lent its name to Salma Hayek's character in From Dusk till Dawn. It features bucolic Mexican landscapes (it was apparently partly financed by the Mexican tourist board, for some unfathomable reason), but also SATAN, and some light self-flagellation, lesbianism, suicide, pedophilia, and murder.

This film actually seems to be a much more serious attempt at drama than the contemporary wave of Italian nunsploitation, which were true exploitation films. Here, there are attempts made at criticizing the Church, racism and mistreatment in the convent, and so on. Is it particularly good at what it sets out to do? Maybe not, but there sure are a lot of naked and bloody nuns, so there's that. Also, the ending is pretty unexpected.

This isn't a great looking remaster, a bit fuzzy and soft, although the cinematography (by Mexican DP legend Jorge Stahl Jr.) is very good. The mono soundtrack is, as was common at the time, mostly looped, and is very sparse (check out several sequences of a choir singing and an organ being played, but the organ mysteriously making no sound), but it's fine. The commentary track with Kat Ellinger and Samm Deighan is good, as they usually are, although they tend to talk more about the film, the cast and crew, and nunsploitation in general, than what's taking place on screen at any given time.

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