School of the Holy Beast (1974)

And Then There Were Nuns

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy School of the Holy Beast on DVD.

In his great book Tokyoscope, Patrick Macias calls School of the Holy Beast "almost unbelievably blasphemous," and there's not much more I can add. Though it's 3 decades old, the film is brutally, almost gleefully aware of its own button-pushing. It dreams up some shocking and subversive image, and then tries to top it. The plot has a beautiful young woman (Yumi Takigawa) joining a nunnery with the ultimate goal of discovering what happened to her mother years earlier (her only clue is a cross with her mother's name etched on the back). While there, she learns of the institution's many closeted skeletons. When the nuns think bad thoughts, they are trained to strip naked and flog themselves. Sometimes other nuns do the naked flogging. Most nuns engage in either lesbian sex acts or straight sex acts with the local priest. In one sequence, a nun confiscates a collection of dirty photos, then keeps taking them out of her drawer to look at them, alternately appalled and aroused. Director Norifumi Suzuki has more on his mind that sex and shock, however. He turns in a lovely, widescreen production with startlingly beautiful use of color, shadow and space; it often looks like a Mario Bava film. One particular scene combines Suzuki's brand of beauty and violence. A naked nun is tied up with barbed wire and whipped with thorny roses; the red petals begin to fly off the stems and float all through the frame. If nothing else, School of the Holy Beast is unlike anything you've seen before...

DVD Details: Cult Epics has done a gorgeous job preserving the film's scope and color with its new DVD release. Extras include a trailer, and interviews with actress Yumi Takigawa and critic Risaku Kiridoushi.

Starring: Yumi Takigawa, Emiko Yamauchi, Yayoi Watanabe, Ryouko Ima, Harumi Tajima, Yuuko Oribe, Marie Antoinette
Written by: Norifumi Suzuki, Masahiro Kakefuda
Directed by: Norifumi Suzuki
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Running Time: 94 minutes
Date: September 20, 2005