St. Agatha

"I own you and your baby!" Carolyn Hennesy's Mother Superior tells our heroine, Mary (Sabrina Kern), at her - highly suspicious - convent for "fallen" women in this solid but uninspired horror set in 1950s Georgia. Mary is pregnant and on the run from her abusive husband, but it's still hard to fathom why she decides to stay at the convent when the other girls offer whispered warnings, degrading rituals and creepy priests abound, and there's something watching from the attic. American director Darren Lynn Bousman made his name with three Saw sequels, before committing himself to original - if unexceptional - material like this. Although a stranger to subtlety, the film has some effective scares, several imaginatively nasty food-based punishments, and handsome cinematography from Joseph White. If you're looking for evil nuns wielding shotguns, cutting out tongues or regurgitating meat into unwilling mouths, you've come to the right place, but shouldn't exploitation cinema be a bit more fun?