School of the Holy Beast (1974)

This was the last of the four films selected from the NFT's "Wild Japan" season and after viewing it, I asked myself whatever possessed me to choose it.  Well the answer is to be found in the season's programme which overhyped this film as one of the most outrageous in cinema history and "way beyond wild".   The more accurate description I can report to you comes from the film notes which describes it as 'the mother superior of all Nipponese nudie nun extravaganzas'!  Yes, you are reading that correctly; I now know that softcore Catholic nun movies were a busy subgenre of Japanese exploitation films in the '70s.  Our heroine spends her last day before entering a convent where 'women aren't women' drinking and clubbing and going to bed with a pick-up.  Ostensibly she is out to find the truth of her mother's death at her birth 18 years earlier, but not before she discovers that the convent is a hotbed of lesbianism, self-flagellation, sexual explotation by a Rasputin-like priest, and countless topess shots of the nuns.  Some of the imagery is amazing, such as our heroine being punished by being trussed up with long brambles and being beaten by bouquets of roses, but the overall story as she seeks justice for the harm done to her mother, who was also a nun, is completely over the top.  OK, the gory retribution paid by the worst culprits is satisfying, but this is the sort of film that one hates oneself for even seeming to enjoy watching.