Nude Nuns With Big Guns [DVD]

The Catholic church is renound for misdemeanours and questionable ethics, though I'm not sure if they are heavily involved in drug production as depicted in this film. The first fifteen minutes of Nude Nuns with Big Guns shows how nuns staff small heroin factories under the supervision of priests. It's a fairly slick operation until complications lead to a nun being 'gifted' to a gang boss where she is subsequently drugged and used as a prostitute. The rest of the film is set a year later, and Sister Sarah is after revenge.

This is reminiscent of a Western, much of the music wouldn't sound out of place as you watch cowboys and the fonts used for any on screen text looks like it's straight from a 'wanted' poster. I wasn't expecting much from this film, the title and any promo material you may have seen makes this out to be a cheesy action flick - but it's actually well directed and often quite with stylish use of on-screen graphics resulting in a film which looks pretty good.

I've seen the film compared to Tarantino works and although there seems to be a definite influence it would be wrong to call Joseph Guzman a poor-man's version of Quentin Tarantino as he has his own style which works very well here. Quickly edited when it needs to be and interspersed with super grained black and white images with colour filters and slow-motion to add atmosphere at times - the film contains some impressive cinematography and it certainly doesn't look like the cheap feature the title would lead you to believe!

'Nude nuns...' is a violent film, but not hyper violent to the extent of many other shock-features on the market (particularly the Japanese ones like Machine Girl). The gore here looks quite realistic and it gives the film a brutal feel rather than one which contains over-the-top 'cartoon' violence. The most disturbing scenes are the ones involving sexual abuse, one in particular was particularly difficult to watch but it certainly succeeded in making you despise the bad guys even more. You really want to see Sister Sarah bring them to justice. This film may contain some powerful religious imagery but ultimately this is a violent revenge film which doesn't waste any excuse to show naked females, and they all seem to be very liberal with their sexual attitudes - this is never going to be regarded as a modern classic, it's not a great film but it manages enough quality to ensure it isn't awful.

This Blu-ray release looks good, the transfer captures plenty of detail and for a low budget film this looks better than you'd probably expect. The audio however isn't great. There's not much depth to the audio and although the music sounds okay, the dialogue often sounds a bit distant and some scenes look redubbed in post production (perhaps to make it more audible) and in those scenes the lip sync looks a bit clumsy. I suspect the lines were altered and in high-definition the mismatch between mouth movements and the actual words delivered are more obvious. For anyone wanting subtitles - there aren't on this disk.

In a nutshell: Though 'Nuns With Big Guns' depicts a corrupt clergy where blind faith is used to abuse the trust of nuns and involve them in terrible crimes and contains something of a modern satire on how people often cherry pick the parts of the bible which support their actions - it is essentially a 90 minutes vengeance piece which watches like a cross between From Dusk 'Til Dawn and Unforgiven. It contains cheesy dialogue but nowhere near as much as I was expecting. It's a run-of-the mill guns `n gore film but with better production values and fairly good acting compared to the usual fayre. I expected this to be a terrible film and it turned out to be not quite as bad as I thought it would be.

This is without doubt one of the most awesome films ever made!! If you love grind house style exploitation movies then you will not want to miss this!! The film is your classic revenge story about a Nun who is drugged and raped after being involved with drug dealers and manages to escape and has a vision from God to kill all those who have sinned!!! This movie is packed to the wall with female nudity, lesbians, Loads of awesome blood and violence!! Everything you want from this type of movie. Its very Robert Rodriguez in a few places you can see the influence, and the title score is dangerously close to planet terror!! Over all this is a fantastic straight to DVD film I would have paid good money to watch it in a cinema!! Great cast Asun Ortega plays the lead character a very sexy actress, good editing well directed and buckets of fun, blood and boobs, pure grind house exploitation gold worth every penny, gem of a film!!!!!

With a title like this you know what you're going to get and Dangermouse's review tells you all you need to know about the story. What is suprising for a film like this is just how good it is. I've seen plenty of low budget movies and that's what they look like but here everyone overacts competently, its properly edited and the shots are well composed and lit. Suffice it to say this is grindhouse of a merchantable quality. That said it is also anti-catholic, violent and exploitative but hey, what did you expect? If you like revenge, violence, nudity and sex you'll love it.