School of the Holy Beast is a sacrilegious blast of exploitation that combines pinky violence, nunsploitation, Bava-esque colors and some of the wildest moments you’ve ever seen in a movie maybe ever. Japan is not Christian or even Catholic, yet somehow they love to make nunsploitation films. This movie proves that they come close and may even go further than their Italian moviemaking competition.

Maya Takigawa (Yumi Takigawa, Karate Bearfighter) has become one of the sisters of the Sacred Heart Convent to learn why her mother was whipped and hung herself before in death giving birth to Maya. I’m sure you can figure out that the Abbess Sadako Matsumara (Yoko Mihara) was the one who was always jealous of Maya’s mother Michiko and that the man who was her father is the blind Father Kakinuma (Fumio Watanabe). Yet this movie embraces style — and excess — and delivers everything you come to these movies for and more, include self-flagellation, sinful nuns, a nun forced to drink salt water and be held over a portrait of Jesus to see if she’s possessed and will urinate all over it, evil nuns falling through trap doors and getting launched out windows and being impaled on a fence and a scene where the nuns all whip another with roses after she’s tied up with rose thorns and small motion petals dance in front of the camera and blood slowly makes its way, as red as any fake hemoglobin that Mario Bava committed to screen against the lush green of the vines. Has blasphemy ever looked so gorgeous?

It all ends on Christmas night, as the priest makes love to his daughter — he didn’t know until its too late — before being stabbed with a crucifix by the ghost of Maya’s mother and then the camera spins and sails into the ceiling to show him dead in the shape of an upside-down cross

Norifumi Suzuki is definitely going to Hell but at least he left this behind to corrupt more souls who will join him in eternal torment. He made fifty more movies, including the incredible Hoero Tekken,and Karei-naru tsuiseki as well as another movie filled with sleaze, Sex and Fury.  Suzuki also directed the ten-movie Torakku Yarō series in which Momojiro Hoshi and Kinya Aikawa race around Japan in dekotora or highly decorated trucks. I need to watch everything he made. He often worked with his co-writer on this movie, Masahiro Kakefuda.

Imagine if an Italian Gothic horror film, a giallo and a nun film all got together, got high and talked about the issues behind everything man has endured. That gives you a clue of just how wild this movie gets, except it may even defile — not a typo for defy — your expectations so much further.

You have to love a heroine who literally destroys an entire convent and then just walks the street of the city, away from this secret world and back in the world of the living, no one knowing the things that she’s seen or what she’s done.