Do NOT watch this movie

In spite of that warning above, I’m sure some of you probably will. I mean, when somebody tells you not to watch a certain movie, your curiousity gets piqued, and all the warnings in the world will not stop you unless you have seen for yourself why every single copy of that movie must be burned - and I don’t mean pirated.

I should have listened to my friend, who downloaded a copy of Love Letters of a Portugese Nun to her laptop, when she told me that watching it was a bad idea. But I had a long break and I was bored, so I ignored her warnings and watched. Little did I know that I had just sentenced myself to two hours of the wrongest, most disturbing film I have ever seen.

Love Letters of a Portugese Nun starts out quite innocently - a young girl named Maria frolicking in the fields with some guy while beautiful violin music played in the background. Then an old priest, who looks a lot like Viktor in the movie Underworld, pops up from out of nowhere, says that Maria is living a life of sin, and sends her off to a convent to save her soul, or some shit like that.

The first signs that things were about to get very fucked up–figuratively and literally–was when the mother superior (or the priestess, as she insisted she be called) made Maria part her legs so she could check if her hymen was intact. Right afterwards she goes to confession, where Viktor the priest (as I will now call him) jacks off to her dream about giving a blow job to her cousin.

And then, from out of nowhere, is a shot of the priestess kneeling and praying. Then she stands up, and my jaw just drops because she was wearing the hood thing nuns wear, and just that. It was a topless nun. I shit you not. Then I learn that it’s apparantly not a Catholic convent, but a Satanic one! After she gets up from praying to Satan, she lies down on bed, with one nun on each side (with the hooded thing and topless as well), and then some funky shit that involves really bushy pubic hair happened.

Eventually, Maria realized that there was something really wrong about the convent. But instead of running far, far away from the place like any intelligent being would, Maria tried to write to her mother to get her out. But the stupid girl didn’t think that Viktor and the priestess would intercept the letter, which they did. They put her in this weird cage thing, then Viktor makes her go down on him. I thought that seeing a young girl give a blow job to an old man was the worst of it all, but I was sadly mistaken.

The two of them decide to offer up her virginity to Satan, in a weird ceremony that involved more bushy pubic hair and a lot of breast groping. I have absolutely no idea how breast groping is supposed to glorify Satan’s name. If it was some weird message the filmmaker was trying to make, I didn’t get it. Anyway, the most uncool Satan I have ever seen on screen appears amidst all the lesbian acts, I couldn’t help but burst out laughing because he looked so stupid. You’d think Satan would look bad-ass or handsome, like the Church warns us about, but he’s an old man with the traditional two goat horns and a weird third one coming out from the middle of his forehead.

I guess what made it so shocking for me was that I wasn’t really expecting all that breast groping and pubic hair. It was more artsy-fartsy erotic than pornographic, but still. *shudder* It took me a good thirty minutes to get over it, and even afterwards I was still haunted by certain images from the movie. I will never look at nuns the same way again.

Since I actually liked the cinematography and music, I am going to give this movie a 1/5, instead of the 0 I had originally planned. But if you’re the kind of person who is slightly homophobic and gets a huge kick out of cinematography and music, watch something else! Save yourself, and don’t watch this movie!