Nowhere Near as Fun as the Title

I watch good movies and I watch bad ones. I go into some movies knowing they’re going to be bad but, for one reason or another, I feel compelled to watch them. Sometimes it’s just for completeness sake, to watch a series through its highs and lows so I can get a perspective on how a franchise evolves over time. Other times, though, I watch a bad movie simply for the joy of seeing something terrible. A bad movie can be as fun as a good movie if it has the right level of silliness, cheesy, and winking humor about its own quality. You can really get into a bad movie if it’s done right.

In a random surf of Reddit (where I learn, once again, how much that site has already learned about me and my tastes), a channel for bad movies came up. The thread in particular was for Nude Nuns with Big Guns which sounds like the kind of shitty fake film you’d see advertised in the background of a Quentin Tarantino film. The various posters in the thread said they had seen it and it was awful. “Do not watch. Terrible film.” But the title of the film was absolutely cheese. I figured to myself, “how bad could this film really be with a name like that?” Clearly the producers were in on the joke, right?

Well, having now watched the film (which, thankfully, I found streaming for free online) I can attest that, despite its solid and humorous name, the film really is terrible and not worth watching. It’s a poorly made film, which I expected, but it also has enough questionable content to make many viewers turn the film off in disgust. We’re talking multiple instances of sexual assault, along with a couple of scenes of rape, and while all of this is at a B-movie level of filming (so you can see that no one is really having sex and no one is actually getting hit) that doesn’t change the content in question. Add that to a film that also lacks any kind of humor, action, or self-awareness, and we have a recipe for a very bad time.

Written and directed by Joseph Guzman, the film focuses on Sister Sarah (Asun Ortega), a nun who is given to a drug cartel as part of a drug running deal out of her church. She’s then drugged up so she can serve as sex slave in a whorehouse. When she’s abused and then overdoses during one session with a john, the whorehouse’s medic nurses her back to health. She tells him that, while out of her mind, she had a vision from God telling her to seek vengeance against those who wronged her. The medic gives her a set of guns to help her on her path, and then Sarah sets off to find the men responsible.

This leads her to Los Muertos, the gang run by the evil Chavo (David Castro). Chavo has a deal with the parish, as sanctioned by the Cardinal of the region, letting him run drugs and whores throughout the territory. Sarah, though, finds one of the drug houses and kills all of Chavo’s goons working there. She then starts working her way up, taking out priests and thugs alike, to rip the drug trade out of the territory, roots and stem. And, in the end, she has her sights set on Chavo, the man who threw her into the whorehouse, so that she can have her holy vengeance.

Nude Nuns with Big Guns sets itself as a nunsploitation movie. It has the low budget filming, the violence, the nuns. It knows what it wants to be. The issue with the film is that, beyond its basic concept – a nun on a quest for vengeance – it doesn’t actually do much with the setup. This is a film where the nun should go from place to place, exacting righteous vengeance in over-the-top scenarios, as befits the concept. You should have her blasting through waves and waves of dudes in various locales, like she’s some kind of Holy Robocop. Whether she’s nude or not for it (as the title doesn’t really have to be accurate for us to have fun with the action) the basic thing we need to see is the film having fun being an over-the-top splatter fest. It’s not.

It’s not really fun at all, frankly. The film is an absolute slog with terrible pacing. We get a ton of scenes of the bad guys sitting around, talking, plotting this scheme or that one, but they never really do anything. Even when they say they’re going to enact something, like chasing down the nun that’s going after them, it’s mostly handled via phone calls. For a film with this large cast of bad guys, and a whole evil plot about the Church running drugs (which, note, it’s never explained why the Church is running drugs), you’d expect them to actually do more.

The few times the bad guys get up to actual nefarious deeds, it’s to rape women. There are three scenes of this in the film, scattered in around a ton of scenes with women working on strippers and whores, casually walking around naked. The film clearly wanted to emphasize the “nude” part of its title with all the titillation it could, but it really goes hard on the rape. I’m not going to say there’s every a good time to put rape into a film, but the times this film uses it are certainly sequences where it’s not warranted. The bad guys see two women traveling and they decide to immediately rape them, or they have to torture information out of a nun, so they rape her, and then they do it again. In each of these sequences, the bad guys treat the act like it’s the logical thing to do and, well, no. It’s not.

Take the scene of the two women the bad guys capture. We already know they’re bad guys because they’re violent drug runners. Putting the two women in so they can be caught and sexually assaulted is there only because the writer/director wanted to put that in the film. We didn’t need these two women in the film at all, let alone to see what happens to them afterwards. For the plot, this sequence serves no purpose. And the same goes for the torture sequence. The bad guys could have done basically anything else to get the information out of these women but those other options aren’t even considered. It makes you think the writer/director of the film really just wanted to film some rape.

That alone would make this film a hard watch for anyone. But even if you can somehow push past that (which, no doubt, would be hard), the rest of the film gives you no pleasures. The acting is sub par, the writing is shallow at best, and the action is abysmal. A typical sequence involves two guys saying something we already knew, while naked women move around in the background, and then Sister Sarah shows up and shoots them all in the head. That’s the whole of the movie, over and over again, until it ends. It’s boring, when it isn’t outright offensive, and there simply no fun to be had from the entire experience.

Nude Nuns with Big Guns is a trashy title that should have an equally trashy movie to go with it. It should be loud, and stupid, and over the top. But most of all it shouldn’t be boring. I want to try and say that due to budget limitations, and maybe this being Joseph Guzman’s first film (I have no clue if it is or not, I’m just guessing), we should cut the film some slack. But, simply put, this film isn’t worth that kind of grace. The title promises trashy fun but, in the end, the movie is just trash.