Noribumi Suzuki

"School of the Holy Beast" is an astounding piece of surreal Japanese nunsploitation. The plot is rather slight: a young girl Maya (Yumi Takigawa) enters a strict convent in an effort to discover what became of her mother, a nun who died mysteriously in the same convent some 18 years previously. She befriends the rebellious Hisako (Yayoi Watanabe) and the pair struggle against the hypocrisies of the Church and the perverted punishments dished out in the convent.
The film is superbly constructed with masterful direction from Noribumi Suzuki and stunning cinematography and set designs by Suzuki's regular collaborator Shuichiro Nakamura. The sets are gothic and magnificent. The colour palette is stunning with the gloriously garish reds being particularly spectacular. Some of the individual set-pieces are stunning: a nun being flogged in slow motion with red roses bushes with the petals floating around her is a surreal highlight. There is nudity a plenty as suppressed sexual desires burst forth to be held in check by fetishistic floggings. There is volcanic lesbian sex, religious allegory and outright blasphemy, while an unexplained white cat prowls and meows mysteriously throughout the film. A superb semi-choral, semi-operatic score by Masao Yagi adds an additional ravishing sheen to the fantastical proceedings. A magnificent piece of work.… (more)