Opening Prayers (You’ll Need Them)
If you’ve ever wondered what Carrie would look like if you stripped away the budget, replaced the prom with a convent, and swapped John Travolta for a Rottweiler with a habit, The Other Hell is here to answer your prayers — or more accurately, to make you lose your faith in cinema. Directed (and I use that word loosely) by Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso, this Italian nunsploitation mess is a smorgasbord of cheap gore, confusing theology, and dialogue so bad you’ll want to take a vow of silence just to avoid repeating any of it.
The film opens with a murder in the convent morgue, which should set the tone for a tense, atmospheric horror. Instead, it sets the tone for 88 minutes of “What in the name of St. Whoever is going on here?”
Plot: A Labyrinth of Stupid, Somewhere Under a Chapel
We meet Sister Cristina wandering the catacombs in search of Sister Assunta, who is busy embalming a nun and casually explaining that Satan likes to knock up women in wimples. From here, the story becomes a dizzying sequence of deaths, bleeding mouths, spontaneous stigmata, and an unholy amount of awkward stares.
Father Inardo shows up to “purify” the convent but gets himself killed before he can do much besides wander the halls and look uncomfortable. Enter Father Valerio, our so-called protagonist, tasked with solving the mystery. His investigation is less “Sherlock Holmes” and more “guy who just keeps walking into the wrong room at the wrong time.”
Eventually, we discover the real evil isn’t the Devil at all, but Mother Vincenza — a dictatorial nun with the kind of glare that could curdle holy water. She’s hiding her daughter Elisa, a telekinetic, facially-scarred Satan-spawn she’s been using as a convent enforcer.
This is revealed via a flashback so unintentionally hilarious it could be its own comedy short: as a newborn, Elisa was thrown into boiling water by the previous abbess… only to psychically force her attacker to strangle herself. That’s right — psychic newborn revenge. I half-expected her to light up a cigarette and mutter, “That’ll teach you, sister.”
Mother Vincenza: Habits and Bad Habits
Franca Stoppi plays Mother Vincenza like she’s auditioning for RuPaul’s Drag Race: Vatican Edition. She’s supposed to be menacing, but most of the time she looks like she’s silently judging the cameraman. Her plan — hide a Satanic daughter in a convent and use her as a hitman — raises questions the film never answers, such as: how exactly does one balance the Eucharist schedule with demonic murder errands?
Her eventual confession that she made a pact with the Devil feels less like a shocking twist and more like a “duh” moment. By that point, if she’d said she was also the Zodiac Killer, it wouldn’t have felt out of place.
Elisa: Telekinetic Terror or Tragic Burn Victim?
Elisa is the kind of horror villain who should be terrifying but mostly inspires confusion. She spends most of the film in a hidden room like some convent-based Phantom of the Opera, occasionally killing someone with the power of her mind. Her targets are random, her motivations vague, and her makeup so rubbery you can practically hear it squeak.
The final showdown between Elisa and her mom should be emotional, but it plays out like an awkward family argument that just happens to include stabbing and corpse animation. Elisa dies, Mother Vincenza dies, and the audience dies inside.
The Men of the Cloth: Holy Incompetence
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Father Inardo: Shows up, blesses a room, dies. Pretty much it.
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Father Valerio: Our lead investigator, whose strategy for solving the mystery is to stand around looking concerned until someone else dies. By the end, he’s in a hospital, having “lost his senses.” Relatable.
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The Bishop: Wanders in for the climax, dismisses the supernatural chaos as an “earthquake,” and immediately gets a screaming corpse dropped into his arms. Divine comedy at its finest.
Production Values: Hell Is in the Details
Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso shot this movie at the same time as The True Story of the Nun of Monza — in the same building, with the same cast. One director worked upstairs, the other downstairs, like some unholy sitcom premise. You can feel the production shortcuts in every frame: recycled sets, mismatched lighting, and a soundtrack cribbed from Goblin albums because paying for new music was apparently a sin.
The gore is enthusiastic but cheap — lots of red paint, rubber limbs, and quick cuts to hide the fact that no one on set knew how to make a stabbing look real. The “laboratory” in the morgue looks like a high school science project left out too long.
Theological Accuracy: Questionable at Best
If you’re looking for a theologically sound take on demonic possession, look elsewhere. This is the kind of movie where communion wafers cause mouth bleeding, newborns develop psychic murder powers instantly, and bishops think multiple homicides are probably just a tremor.
The Devil’s role is mostly off-screen, which makes you wonder why he bothered with all this convent drama instead of just sending a memo.
Final Judgment: A Sin Against Horror
The Other Hell is the cinematic equivalent of a sacrilegious prank pulled by film students who got locked in a church basement overnight. It’s got gore, nuns, catacombs, and enough overacting to fill a cathedral, but none of it comes together in a way that’s actually scary.
If you’re a fan of bad Italian horror, you might find some joy in its absurdity — the psychic baby flashback alone is worth a morbid chuckle. But for everyone else, this is less “The Other Hell” and more “The Other Waste of 88 Minutes.”
