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In theatres now (and no doubt hitting DVD before long) is the Korean film The Host. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a monster movie this good, and even longer since we’ve had one with this much depth.

Any text, of course, has its subtext, and this is as true of giant monster movies as any other work of art. But some films are much more a much richer subtext than others, partly because the filmmakers were quite deliberate in seeing their monsters in a metaphorical or symbolic light. Though the e...d results are very different, this level of depth is most clearly visible in the likes of King Kong (1933), Godzilla (1954) and Them! (1954).

A tale of three films. One is original. One is its remake. One is a cash-in. And the latter is the one that became a classic.

In 1975, a big-budget SF effort by Norman Jewison hit the theatres with much publicity. This was Rollerball. In a future world with no wars, and everything is controlled by corporations, human aggression is channeled through the titular, extremely violent game. The game has been designed to be such that becoming good at it is impossible, and thus there are no heroes, and the f...tility of human endeavour is underlined. But then James Caan, as Jonathan E., becomes that impossible thing: a champion, and thus a hero. He refuses to retire, and so the powers that be keep changing the rules, making the game more and more lethal, in an effort to bring him down.

Gosh, I don’t know if today’s subject counts as cult movies. These are genre films, though. And they’re old.

Really old.

There’s exploitation, and there’s exploitation. And then there’s nunsploitation. There are few forms more unabashedly interested in the full-on sleaze wallow, with the possible exception of the nunsploitation film’s close cousin, the Women In Prison (WIP) flick. As ever, this is less a survey (there’s an entire book on the subject out there), more some semi-random musings.

Sleazy as the form gets, its roots are relatively serious in nature (but then, the same is true of the WIP). One of the pioneering works...in the field is Domenico Paoella’s Story of a Cloistered Nun (1973, out on DVD from NoShame). A more handsomely produced film than many others of its ilk would be, it is something of a gem for fans of Dario Argento, in that it stars three of his heroines: Suzy Kendall (from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) is the mother superior, Catherine Spaak (from Cat O’ Nine Tails) is the bad girl, and Eleonora Giorgi (from Inferno) is the title character. The basic formula is here: unwilling novice is locked up by her family in the convent, is lusted over by her fellow nuns, and becomes pregnant thanks to an illicit affair. Much torment ensues. This effort is, however, far more restrained in the nudity department than most of its successors, and much of the time comes very close to passing itself off as a serious period drama. Something one would not be able to say of the works of Joe D’Amato and Bruno Mattei.