W I D E R SCREENINGS TM presents...
AUSTRALIAN CINEMA / DVD
BAD HABITS (2009)
DANK FILMS
d. Dominic Deacon; pr. Anna Young; scr. Dominic Deacon; ph. Marcus Dineen; snd. Evan Kitchener; ed. Dominic Deacon; cast. Sandra Case, London Gabrielle, Mat Wearing, Haydn Evans (84 mins)
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ORIGINAL POSTER ART
Australian Underground Filmmaking Tackles a Quintessentially European Sexploitation Sub-Genre
Austere and stylized, Bad Habits is Dominic Deacon’s first feature film as director and it is an ambitious undertaking: Aussie Nunsploitation!
Now that may be repellent to some but nunsploitation is a well-respected subgenre within European exploitation cinema and the conceptual daring attempted by Deacon as scripter-director and producer Anna Young must be admired for its sheer audacity: transplanting Anita Ekberg’s heroin addicted Mother-Superior-Jumped-the-Gun from The Killer Nun into a twisted, perversely but understatedly erotic relationship between two nuns, one experienced in the ways of the world and the other a virgin girl half her age.
TRAILER
Australian exploitation has thrived on importing sensationalistic film forms – from the stuntman as superstar works of Brian Trenchard-Smith in Deathcheaters and Stunt Rock to the country death-trap of “head on a stick” Wolf Creek – and here it shows a knowledge and command of the disreputable genre in the evocation of a junkie erotica that parallels heroin intoxication to orgasm during sexual homicide – evocative of the heroin-chic cult film Liquid Sky more so than the Aussie strain of social realism in depicting heroin use: a line of descent from Pure Shit to Dogs in Space and Little Fish.
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Art-House meets Exploitation in the Ghetto of Style vs. Substance
A grim, haunting score combines with a dank, drearily shadowy seemingly perpetual night cinematography that finally takes this film from the nunsploitation ghetto to the pioneering mix of art-house and exploitation in the work of Gaspar Noe.
But where Noe evoked male sexual pathology, Bad Habits evokes Matriarchal psychosis in a parody of the notion of the nun as a bride of Christ (indeed, a highly regarded ABC mini-series involving nuns was so titled Brides of Christ):
“MAN: I thought you were supposed to be married to God.
NUN: We have an open relationship.”
Two scenes of smouldering sexuality
Although Australian in production – shot on an extremely low budget by first time Melbourne feature makers Dank Films – Bad Habits is abstracted in place and time: it’s a distillation of nunsploitation which endeavours to turn the central figure of the genre – the hysterical woman – from perverse sexual object into empathetic sexual subject – a truly commanding figure of defiant female authority. This the film achieves over three sequences. The first, titled Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (in an allusion to the Lucio Fulci giallo with Florinda Balkan), is a character portrait of a mature woman (Sandra Casa) – a heroin user, she dresses as a nun (whether she is or is not is uncertain) to frequent bars, seemingly running into men she kills for sexual satisfaction but with ritualistic repetition. The second, So Sweet, So Perverse is an eerie evocation of the abstract visceral beauty of sexual homicide as a parallel to the narcotic “experience” of heroin. The third, Crazy Hot, is a triumph of transgressive feminist bonding echoing such as Thelma & Louise but with the defiant women allowed a triumph denied such rebellion in Hollywood.
Beginning with a brilliant re-envisioning of the iconography and premise of Guilio Berruti’s The Killer Nun, Bad Habits’ sense of visceral immediacy is as evocative of the underground sexual-homicide-as-sexual-empowerment-for-women fantasies of Jorg Buttgereit in the Nekromantik films as it is of the stark, primary colour drenched melodrama of the German New Wave and Rainer Werner Fassbinder: scenes involving gay sailors and stylized interiors resemble a low-budget Querelle alongside The Killer Nun, making Bad Habits a richly allusive genre film. But Bad Habits isn’t the first Aussie film to allude to Fassbinder – the bizarre all-male Dog Watch had a similarly evocative brew.
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Psychodramas of Matriarchal Hysteria & Repression in the Mythification of Sexual Self-Empowerment
Plot is secondary to atmosphere and a constantly simmering sexuality.
What plot there is unfolds teasingly: in weaving narratives between the nun’s homicidal exploits and her matriarchal bonding with a younger nun (London Gabrielle) – her grooming of the girl as potential lover (forcing her to wear lipstick, makeup, dress up and go to a nightclub). Yet unlike so much previous nunsploitation where the erotification of the hysterical or repressed nun makes the type an objectified caricature of maternal religiosity, the gradual revelation of the mostly clothed women here breaks only for contemplative nudes in association with water: a traditional symbol of both feminine sexuality and the unconscious – hence the symbolic emphasis on drowning.
Just as Bad Habits emphasizes the psychodrama of the nunsploitation film and coolly dissects the associated hysteria and repression, so too it obfuscates traditional narrative, playing games with repetitive scenarios and repeated characters so as to be moodily enigmatic, its shifting spaces leaving the alert, patient viewer dislocated and unfamiliar in the terrain of hysterical smack-induced psycho-drama. Interestingly, in that the film is never clear about whether these two women are indeed actual nuns it is more about the pretence of religious devotion (and associated sexual purity) as a factor in women’s sexual socialization – in this way the film mythologizes nunsploitation as a genre mythologizing empowerment / sexual self-actualization fantasy, intersecting, as it does in its scenes of sex murder, serial killer pathology.
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Religion and Transgressive Australian Sex Fantasy
Though there are lesbian implications between these two women and their nascent yearning is tantalizingly developed (the younger liking to look and the older liking to be looked at, gradually instructing the younger in a similar pleasure in sexual subjectification), the film is more concerned with matriarchal socialization.
Thus, the nun here is an ambiguous figure of the idealized female and the film in elevating the drug-using sex killer into this symbolic position is a transgression of religious morality regarding women’s acceptable sexuality. The older woman is less interested in the younger as sexual object than as future experiencing subject, remarking with junkie longing that she admires the virgin for her untouched veins.
Complex, thought-provoking and stylish within its obvious budgetary limitation, Bad Habits is a brooding film, with flashes of energy. Its sexual charge is tightly controlled and it never becomes exploitative of its women, both of whom perform with a functional, mannered certainty, Casa a nice example of control and mature authority. Plot is not this film’s strongest point – its more a mood piece homage to a disreputable genre but one which sees it for the opportunity it gives to women in terms of the sexual (and spiritual / worldly) socialization. The best exploitation is intelligent, visceral and transgressive and on those levels, Bad Habits is a fine piece of Ozploitation – genuine, full-on Aussie Nunsploitation: as that, this film delivers the goods. Dank to the hilt!
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Bad Habits
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