Reified and Refined

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Design by Chris Ayers

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“Blood Sister: One Tough Nun” - Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Telma Hurley, Pam Heath, Marla-Dean Chumm, Dianne Saltoone, Soma Richardson-Levy, Cosgrove Watt; 35 mm; 90 minutes; color; sound. Parody of revenge/recidivism action genre, a formerly delinquent nun’s (Hurley’s) failure to reform a juvenile delinquent (Chumm) leads to a rampage of recidivist revenge. INTERLACE TELENT PULSE-DISSEMINATION 21 JULY Y.T.M.P., CARTRIDGE #357-87-04

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What’s black and white and red all over?

“Blood Sister: One Tough Nun” was one of Incandenza’s only commercial successes and is also one of the few films in his oeuvre with a strightforward narrative. In the novel there is a fairly lengthy discussion of the plot, which revolves around a “biker chick” turned nun who is saved from her wicked ways by an older nun. Blood Sister, in turn, begins to mentor a troubled young girl, who eventually turns up dead, we eventually learn at the hands of the Mother Superior. 

Hal, James Incandenza’s son, wonders briefly what his father’s mindset might have been while making this untypical film. Hal suspects that it was an attempt by his father to make a film in a commercial genre “that so grotesquely exaggerated the formulaic schticks of the genres that they became ironic metacinematic parodies of the genres: ‘sub/inversions of the genres….”

In one of the endnotes, it is revealed that, for James Incandenza, the film and it’s theme of recidivism served as a metaphor for his own alcoholism and frustration with the idea of AA sponsorship.