The Sister of Ursula

Reviewed by fuggy

Here’s a sexy giallo flick recently unearthed by Severin Films that’s definitely worth a look. The Italian gialli of the 1970s usually favored blood over sex, but this one balances it out a little more in favor of the sex. I’m in!

Dagmar (Stefania D’Amario) and Ursula Beyne (Barbara Magnolfi) are sisters who have recently come into some money from their father, and looking all over Italy for their mother, in order to share the wealth. They check into a hotel on the Amalfi coast, and run into a number of shady characters, including Roberto, the hotel manager, and Filippo, the local drug fiend. Suddenly, murders occur. In typical over-the-top Italian giallo fashion, they’re done by a masked killer with a giant impaling penis. Ursula, an intense girl to say the least, sees visions of more murders occurring, and worse yet, seems to think that her father is alive and that he’s actually responsible for them. Ursula acts as though she’s possessed. Lemme guess...this movie came out soon after The Exorcist? There’s plenty of Argento influence on the plot, too.

Some of the sex scenes are just this side of explicit. Roberto and the lounge singer Stella get hot and horny, with some quality mouth on pussy (MoP) action. A young couple turned away from the hotel for being “minors” gets to feel each other up. And Dagmar, the titular sister, gets sexually frustrated and masturbates herself with a gold chain while Ursula sleeps next to her. I do wish they had invented the trimmer by the 1970s; the bushes are especially luxuriant, especially being that the actresses are Italian. That’s the only thing keeping some of the fun at bay. But a couple of the more fair-haired actresses show off more than what you usually get in the usual softcore film. There are also two or three penises on display. Not on the women, I promise.

One complaint...Ursula herself. Barbara Magnolfi is quite striking, with jet black hair and deep green eyes. Jennifer Connelly, eat your heart out. But—in a movie that is quite steamy—all we get is one nipple! How can you take the hottest girl in the movie, give her the lead role, and then not show her goodies? I find myself wishing that the French had remade this movie in the 1980s, because then Florence Guerin would be in it and I would have no complaints whatsoever.

As usual, Severin treats their DVDs like jewels. In addition to a very clean print of an obscure movie, there’s also an informative interview with the director, Enzo Milioni. He reveals that one of the actresses, Anna Zinneman, was upset about having to play a lesbian scene, and refused to do it. Somehow he convinced her to think of it as a mother taking care of her daughter, and through that subterfuge he ended up getting her to perform one of the most explicit scenes in the movie. Now, if only he had worked his magic on Ursula herself!

You have to be absolutely daft not to figure out who the murderer is, as well as the murder weapon, because it’s all spelled out rather early on. However, if you are daft, then you’ll probably enjoy the movie even more.

The big mystery is why it’s called The Sister of Ursula. Ursula’s sister has relatively llittle to do, other than to get naked a few times and get annoyed with Ursula, often at the same time. My guess is that the title is to confuse everybody into thinking this is a nunsploitation film, which is what I thought I was in for at first. Those films were very popular in Italy; the question becomes then, why not just make this into a nun film? Surely Ursula, with all her Ursuline attributes, would make a great crazy nun, in the habit of tearing off her, oh well, you know where I was headed with that joke. I admit I don’t mind seeing some nuns display their nunbags now and then. Who doesn’t?

STILLS - Click for larger image