Catholic Mexico exploits the nunsploitation genre with SATANICO PANDEMONIUM, on Blu-ray from Mondo Macabro.

Young, beautiful Sister Maria (Cecilia Pezet) seems at harmony with the natural environment around her convent, ministering to the poor and even blessing the local livestock. Her beatific façade slips, however, when she encounters a naked shepherd (Enrique Rocha, TIME TO DIE) bathing in the lake. The shepherd reveals his true identity as Satan himself, tormenting Maria with apparitions of lust and sin until she gives in to his seduction. She unleashes her own repressed lust upon young farm boy Marcelito and a young novice, goads a black nun to suicide, and her resentment of her position being usurped by the Mother Superior all end in bloody murder. Forced by Satan, to choose between the horrors of the Inquisition or power and pleasure at the price of eternal damnation, Maria may end up damning her entire order and her local flock.

An extremely rare Mexican take on the nunsploitation genre, SATANICO PANDEMONIUM never reaches the hysterical pitch of ALUCARDA, being more of a gender-flipped adaptation of Matthew Lewis' "The Monk" than the latter surrealist conflation of literary and cinematic sources. While a number of Italian nunsploitation films used literary sources like Denis Diderot's "The Nun", the true story of the convent of Monza, or Ken Russell's THE DEVILS as jumping off points, SATANICO PANDEMONIUM (subtitled "La Sexorcista") is rather straightforward in its plotting but satisfyingly restrained in the way it juggles familiar imagery and tropes from tempting apples and snakes to Rocha's as a wolf in literal sheep's clothing while shocking with more nudity and sex than one would imagine getting past the Mexican censors. I say imagine because ALUCARDA also had plenty of nudity, but Juan López Moctezuma's film felt transgressive from the first shot onwards while jobbing Gilberto Martínez Solares – veteran of various Santo/Blue Demon films and Tin-tan vehicles (the closest to horror being the Lon Chaney Jr. film LA CASA DEL TERROR released here in radically re-edited/reshot form by Jerry Warren as THE FACE OF THE SCREAMING WEREWOLF – lulls the viewer in with idyllic settings (the film was co-produced by the Mexican tourism board) including the gothic convent which looks more scenic than oppressive. The ambiguous twist ending also appears to owe less to seventies horror than the literary gothics. Solares had already directed over a hundred features since 1939 and would direct another thirty-odd films in the last twenty years of his career before his death at age ninety in 1997.

Surprisingly given a subtitled theatrical release from Howard Mahler Films in 1977, SATANICO PANDEMONIUM was unavailable for fans until Mondo Macabro's until 2005 with their early fully-supplemented American release. For the new Blu-ray, Mondo Macabro commissioned a new master and received a 4K scan from pre-print materials with some intermittent damage on one of the reels. The owners then supplied a 2K scan from a seemingly never-projected 35mm print. Both transfers have been provided here in 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen. I found myself preferring the 35mm print scan with its minutely higher contrast to the pre-print scan. The highlights of the exteriors scenes appear to be more stable on the print despite another generation or so away from the negative but that may be subjective. It is nice that they included both versions even though the 2K scan would have been more than acceptable. The Spanish DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono tracks sound similar and may indeed be the same track, and both have optional English subtitles.