Joseph W. Sarno. Yeah, that Joe Sarno. The Ingmar Bergman of 42nd Street. The man who gave us Inga and Abigail Lesley is Back in Town. If you’re looking for a guy who understood that the distance between high-art Swedish angst and low-rent skin flicks is about the thickness of a silk stocking, Sarno is your man.

Yet imagine a slasher flick filmed in the Swedish woods, directed by this very same softcore legend, with a plot that feels ghostwritten by a nun on a bad trip. That would be Helgerån, which was also released as Sacrilege.

Sara (Christine Moore, a Roberta Findlay veteran from Lurkers and Prime Evil) shows up at the Church of the New Disciples looking for salvation. She’s got a heavy burden: her twin sister is back in Lapland playing house with Satan and possibly gestating the literal Antichrist by having sex with goats. Also, her mom got her head lopped off and spiked like a volleyball in the intro, but the case is colder than a Nordic winter.

Enter George (Kurt Sinclair), a reporter who is supposed to be investigating the sect but mostly just stares at Sara with puppy-dog eyes. When Sara decides to lead a missionary trip to the old country to save her sister’s soul, George follows. Along for the ride is Sister Naomi (Shannon McMahon, another Findlay alum from Blood Sisters), who has a calling for Sara that isn’t exactly sanctioned by the Vatican.

Oh, you’re surprised by a Sapphic plot in a Sarno movie?

Once they hit the forest, the repressed religious zealotry starts to boil over. Everyone is horny, everyone is crazy, and one girl even wants to go full Sound of Music minus the habit and plus some demented spinning. But while the missionaries are busy struggling with their magic underwear, someone is skulking through the brush with a hand scythe, slicing off hands and heads.

Holy shit — I loved this movie. It’s a slow-moving film in which nothing is paid off, filmed by a man who wasn’t just a smut peddler. He was obsessed with the way sexual epiphanies could shatter repression, which in this movie, he takes that very same theme and grafts it onto a slasher. It’s a heady, talky and occasionally overwrought brew about delusion and madness.

Is Judith really the Sara that gets to have sex and are two people trapped in the same body? Is she a sick young woman? Will men — and a woman? — perhaps wonder which version they’re sleeping with and if one of them is a succubbus?

For a movie directed by a guy who was literally filming legit porn concurrently, it’s also surprisingly chaste for a movie where everyone is DTF in a way that destroys their lives. You get some blouses pinging off and brief topless shots, but it’s more interested in the idea of sex than the act.

The gore, however, is another story. The scythe work is hokey but effective. And at nearly two hours, Sarno may be testing your patience. It’s a marathon of melodrama and some truly wooden acting from Sinclair, who sounds like he’s reciting a grocery list rather than investigating a satanic cult, all in a film that appears to look like it was made for TV, yet with exposed breasts and bloody unattached heads.

But that’s exactly why I drank this in like a sweet glass of Punsch.

Another reason I was all in? The print looks rough. We’re talking tape rolls, tracking issues and VHS static. The fuzziness makes the low-budget decapitations look almost real. It’s a lost oddity from a director who lived in the gutter but kept his eyes on the arthouse stars. It’s not a masterpiece, but in a world of cookie-cutter slashers, this one is a beautiful, bloated freak-out.

You can watch this on Cultpix.