If you think you’ve seen it all because you sat through The Devils or owned a bootleg of Killer Nun, Bruno Mattei is here to grab your rosary beads and yank you straight into the abyss. The Other Hell (originally L’altro inferno) isn’t just a movie; it’s a 90-minute assault on every Sunday School lesson you ever endured.

Get ready for a movie overflowing with blasphemy, shot at the Convento di Santa Priscilla in Rome (once owned by FIAT but now by the Secret Service). Then again, the print that Severin used for the Blu-ray was found behind a false wall in a Bologna nunnery! I sum up this movie with these three words: Not fucking around.

Written by Claudio Fragasso (Rats: The Night of Terror) and directed by Bruno Mattei (Seven Magnificent Gladiators, Robowar), this is a pull-no-punches nunsploitation shockfest. You think mother! was bad?  Then you are by no means ready for this one. A baby gets boiled alive, and that’s the very least of the shocks in store. And if you’re Catholic, well, get ready to go to confession.

Boasting a Goblin score stolen from Beyond the Darkness (actually from their albums Roller and Il fantastico viaggio del bagarozzo Mark; Fragasso said they had the band in the movie “as they were fashionable and asked them to write music for the film, but they asked for a lot of money, leading to the production to use stock music with a few modifications.” Mattei claimed that he was friends with their publisher, Carlo Bixio, who gave him the music he wanted.

The plot kicks off with Sister Cristina getting lost in the catacombs — never a good move in an Italian movie — where she finds Sister Assunta (Paola Montenero, Sylvie from A Bay of Blood) in a morgue laboratory. Assunta is busy embalming corpses and casually dropping lore about nuns fornicating with Satan and the mysterious murder of the previous Mother Superior, Sister Florence. Before you can say “Hail Mary,” Assunta goes into a supernatural trance, murders Cristina and then drops dead herself.

Mother Vincenza (Franca Stoppi, who was also in Beyond the Darkness) tries to play it off as an accident to Father Inardo (Andrea Aureli), but the gig is up when Sister Rosaria (Susanna Forgione) starts spraying blood from her mouth during communion and develops a case of terminal stigmata.

Enter Father Valerio (Carlo De Mejo, who survived City of the Living Dead only to end up here). He’s a scientific priest sent to investigate, but he spends most of his time clashing with Vincenza, who runs the convent like a fascist boot camp.

It turns out the convent’s basement isn’t just for storing communion wine. It’s housing Elisa (Francesca Carmeno), Vincenza’s illegitimate, horribly disfigured daughter, who was tossed into boiling water at birth by the former Mother Superior. Elisa didn’t die, though; she just developed Carrie-esque telekinetic powers, like making people strangle themselves with their own rosaries.

By the time we get to the finale, Vincenza has dropped the act, admitted she made a pact with the Devil and claimed Elisa is the literal daughter of Satan. It all ends in the morgue with resurrected corpses, psychic battles, and Father Valerio losing his mind. The final kicker? The Bishop shows up to investigate the earthquake and gets a face full of rotting nun corpse falling out of a coffin.

Oh yeah — between priests being set on fire and a nun’s severed head in the sacristy, this movie is every nightmare you had in CCD class. When Mother Vincenza yells, “The genitals are the door to evil! The vagina, the uterus, the womb; the labyrinth that leads to hell; the devil’s tools!” you’ll either cheer or recoil in terror, depending on whether or not you ever sat through a five-hour Good Friday mass.

Seriously. This movie tested even my resolve of how far is too far. Which is just another way to tell you that I loved it.

This was shot at the same time as The True Story of the Nun of Monza with most of the same cast and crew. Fragasso says that he shot The Other Hell downstairs and Mattei shot the other upstairs, helping each other as needed. As for Mattei, he would always say that Fragrasso was just an assistant director. They did the same two movies for the price of one on Women’s Prison Massacre and Violence In a Women’s Prison, as well as Scalps and White Apache.

Mattei was interviewed by European Trash Cinema and said, “Let’s say that he has influenced almost everyone. For example, L’altro Inferno/The Other Hell utilized Argento’s concepts, but wasn’t an absolute copy of Inferno, the title was dictated by the distributor. He makes movies wilh lots of blood, I’m not adverse to it but in some countries, like Germany, gory movies aren’t distributed.”

While it premiered in Italy in 1981, it didn’t reach American theaters until 1984, where it was renamed Guardian of Hell. It was unleashed on VHS by Vestron Video, finding its true home in the wood-paneled basements of horror nerds who wanted something a little more European.

I can’t believe that you could have walked into a multiplex and watched this.