Don't Deliver Us From Evil

Year releasted: 1970

by Keith Phipps
April 5th, 2006

Also known as: Fascination

Tagline: "At first it was just a game."

Plot: Sure, going to a private girls' school run by nuns has its advantages: Not only do you get a good education, but sometimes the sexier nuns cast hard shadows as they undress behind curtains. And if you're a wicked-minded schoolgirl like Jeanne Goupil in Don't Deliver Us From Evil, that's a real value-add. An even greater value-add: finding a co-conspirator as game as Catherine Wagener. After launching a campaign of fake confessions and tattling on two nuns they spy kissing, Wagener and Goupil take their misdeeds to the next level, hiding communion wafers and gathering material from a disused chapel in order to pledge their souls to Satan himself.

Key scenes: As the film's creepily pretty score plays in the background, Wagener flashes her panties at a neighboring farmer as Goupil tells him how much Wagener wants him. After the farmer attempts to rape Goupil and she barely escapes, the girls share a good laugh. But it's no laughing matter when, after pulling the same trick on a stranded traveler, the girls have to kill him to stop his unwanted advances, effectively ending their good-times spree of satanic rituals, arson, and budgie-slaying.

Can easily be distinguished by: It's that one '70s European exploitation movie that uses sex and religious imagery to creepy effect. No, wait, that's most of them. But Deliver's young-looking actresses make it especially disturbing, even though both were over 18 when it was shot.

Sign that it was made in 1970: Set in the countryside, Don't Deliver Us From Evil is fairly free of signs of its times, apart, of course, from its pairing of the era's twin obsessions: Satanism and sexual assault.

Timeless message: Sugar and spice aren't all little girls are made of. Sometimes they're just plain bad. But also…

Memorable quotes: As the soon-to-be-taunted farmer tells the young temptresses when they giggle after stumbling on him relieving himself, "You shouldn't watch others pee!"