LA DOLCE VITA's Anita Ekberg dons the habit for the Italian giallo KILLER NUN, on Blu-ray from Arrow Video USA.

Sister Gertrude (Ekberg) has worked in a Catholic private hospital for ten years, respected by her colleagues and the patients. Ever since she had a tumor removed from her brain, however, she has been suffering from intense headaches and blackouts. The hospital's head doctor Poirret (Massimo Serato, THE BLOODSTAINED SHADOW) tells her that her symptoms are psychosomatic and refuses to prescribe her morphine while the Mother Superior (Alida Valli, SUSPIRIA) tells her that it "is a nun's vocation to suffer." When her erratic behavior turns abusive towards the patients, her only source of comfort is lesbian Sister Mathieu (Paola Morra, BEHIND CONVENT WALLS) who is devoted to her. When an elderly patient (Nerina Montagnani) falls into a coma after Gertrude stomps on her dentures in a public scene, Gertrude holds off treatment until the woman expires and steals her morphine. Her need for the drug is such that she travels to the city and pawns a ring to buy more. When her stash disappears, she has a seizure and blacks out whereupon she discovers next morning the body of patient Jannot apparently dead of a suicide until Mathieu reveals that she concealed evidence that he died in their shared room of a violent attack. The patients have become afraid of her, and crippled Peter (Lou Castel, ORGASMO) even goes so far as to accuse her of murder. When Gertrude's surreptitious maneuvers to get rid of Poirret result in the appointment of a new, younger doctor in Rowlands (Joe Dallessandro, FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN), he proves not as easy to manipulate and comes to suspect that Gertrude has done more than mistreat patients, even discovering that a subsequent accidental death of a wheelchair-bound patient was a murder. When Gertrude herself is attacked, it may be that the culprit is someone else or the patients have started to revolt. More murders follow, and soon Gertude is no more certain than Rowlands or anyone else that she is not the killer.

Commonly misidentified as nunsploitation because of the title – even the Italian title translates as THE HOMICIDAL NUN – KILLER NUN is a mix of giallo and Catholic horror ostensibly based on true events. Although not lacking in sleaze, much of the intimations of lesbianism, molestation, necrophilia, geriatric sex, and drug use, these elements are viewed from a detached perspective in contrast to some violence which is not overly gory but nonetheless intense and unpleasant. Gertrude is an interesting character in that underneath her possible delusions and addictions we see that she has perhaps grown tired and embittered of her vocation, thinking of the patients as children and their complaints as imaginary, only feeling free during her interlude in the city where she dons a sexy dress, wears make-up, and picks up a stranger. She is trapped by her faith, as is the killer whose confessional monologues bookend the film and whose righteous anger is dismissed and condemned by the confessor as being beyond the grace of God. The ending is quite cynical and bleak as the church's conspiracy of silence unintentionally covers up the truth in an attempt to avert attention from what is ultimately a red herring. While the end result may not be sleazy enough or visually stylish as one expects from an Italian thriller, the film still packs a punch. The scoring of Alessandro Alessandroni (THE DEVIL'S NIGHTMARE), better known for his choral and instrumental work on scores by Ennio Morricone, ranges from another take on "Dies Irae" to a jangling guitar and percussion theme that found its way into the compilation soundtrack of Hélène Cattet's and Bruno Forzani's THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS.

Unavailable stateside apart from the bootleg circuit until Blue Underground's 2004 DVD and 2012 Blu-ray – also issued in a double bill with Corrado Farina's BABA YAGA – KILLER NUN comes back to Blu-ray from Arrow Video stateside only since Shameless presumably still have UK rights. Mastered from a new 2K scan of the original camera negative, Arrow's 1080p MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 presentation loses the scanner noise common to Italian transfers of last decade and generally offers marginal improvements on a film in terms of grain, fine detail, and colors (the film's color schemes are predominantly white but some blue gel lighting does look a tad more saturated here over the previous transfer). Separate Italian (88:56) and English (87:10) versions are accessible from the main menu via seamless branching, with the primary difference besides Italian credits being the extended ending of the former version which is less cynical by including a text crawl noting that the killer has been caught and is awaiting trial as well as an animated rendition of the title and additional scrolling technical credits (the English version just freezes frame over the final shot and fades to black with THE END). We are not sure what other differences there are, or why Blue Underground's edition with English credits runs 87:49 even though it should run shorter by starting the opening disclaimer and "Enzo Gallo presents" card over the fade-in while it appears on black here before the first shot, unless it (unlike their DVD edition) includes the additional coda. The English version itself includes two ten second passages where the English dub reverts to Italian so it is not the actual English version. The English and Italian LPCM 1.0 mono tracks are clean and boldly present the scoring at seemingly deliberate levels of discomfort without distortion. Optional English SDH subtitles are available for the English track as well as English subtitles for the Italian track.

The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by Italian genre film connoisseurs Adrian J. Smith and David Flint who discuss the film's misclassification not only as nunsploitation – while noting that it does have elements of the genre but deploys them to different effect – and as a Video Nasty in the UK where they note that the video cassette art more so than the actual content may have singled it out for scrutiny. They also discuss the film in the context of Ekberg's career and her latter day move towards Eurotrash, and pointing out that the film does have certain camp and kitsch aspects that do not signify the comedown of Ekberg's post-Hollywood career. They also provide some background on the true crime case behind the film.

“Beyond Convent Walls” video essay by critic Kat Ellinger (29:19) who traces the roots of the nunspoitation genre to Boccaccio's "The Decameron" and the much-adapted story of a stud who pretends to be mute to work in a convent after learning the previous gardener had been worn out by the lust of the sisters, Pasolini's IL DECAMERON and the "sexy Decameron" genre of Italian erotic films, Denis Diderot's "The Nun" (and the Jacques Rivette film) whose tale of a girl forced into a convent and subjected to the sadism of the sisters informed as many traditional nunsploitation films as the true story of the nun of Monza, Matthew Lewis' "The Monk" and "The Devils of Loudon" in which sexualized behavior is associated with possession, as well as the influences of "Satanic Panic" films of the sixties and seventies. More importantly, she discusses how KILLER NUN deviates from the expectations with its nunsploitation/giallo hybrid and the effect thwarted expectations had on the film's reception. In “Our Mother of Hell” (51:51), director Giulio Berruti recalls how the low budget did not allow for the idea of casting the hospital patients with famous Italian actors, using instead family members, small actors, locals, and Castel who was a drinking buddy. He was introduced to Ekberg by famous Italian photographer Angelo Frontoni and Berruti feels that Ekberg accepted the role because she was doted over by his writing partner Alberto Tarallo, a gay actor, writer, and theatre director who handled Ekberg's costumes and make-up as well. He also recalls working with Morra who he did not initially want but proved to be less problematic than Serrato who pissed off the cameraman by arriving with a fake tan and Valli who was drinking on the set.