This is all supposition of course but we are somewhat curious on what made the erstwhile photojournalist Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) renounce her sinful life and devote the remainder of her days to The Lord. I think the answer is much simpler than you could imagine in that she simply ran out of people to screw. After all the cannibals, ping pong balls, stable horses, and gang rapes… not to mention all those countless rolls of film with almost no actual photographs to show for all her hard photo snapping work and having sexed up pretty much every single man, woman and child in Asia, America, Europe and the Polar caps our girl has said ‘forget it… save me Jesus.’ I don’t know about your God but my God is an Awesome God… but even He has His work cut out for Himself with this one.

We first see Emanuelle looking quite resplendent in her pure white habit on her way to pick up a girl in desperate need of cleansing in Monica Castabriaga (Monica Zanchi). It seems that the precocious Monica has been caught seducing her young sizzling hot step mother (Dirce Funari) leaving her father no other option but ship the youngster off to a monastery. Now if I had seen Emanuelle walking up to my doorstep to ‘reform’ MY daughter my initial thoughts would be ‘Great… they’re going to put out a fire by throwing gasoline on it.’ But Emanuelle has truly changed her ways so she, along with her Guardian Mother, jump on a train to take this girl back to what they hope will be her theoretical salvation.

It’s not long before we realize that Monica is straight up bad news. On this train she tries to seduce Sister Emanulle, and fails… which let you know how serious Emanuelle is about this nun shit, then the girl settles for blowing the train conductor. At the school Monica proceeds to turn her chaste roommate into raving lesbian lunatic, finds a runaway bank robber named Renee (Gabriel Tinti), seduces him and hides him out in a tower in the monastery, she lies incessantly and to paraphrase the Mother Superior this poor order of Sisters has clutched a serpent to their bosom.

Emanuelle has her own issues she’s dealing with in addition to Monica and her overall trouble making, as this Mother Superior is well aware of Emanuelle’s past and is keeping a close and wary eye on her new smoking hot nun. Should Emanuelle screw up… say wear the wrong kind of underwear again… she will be smited with the curse Satan’s wrath. And that was just for wearing the wrong type of panties. There’s a struggle going on within Emanuelle as her old life is pulling her on one side and her new life is trying desperately to hold on… who will win? I don't want to spoil it for you but when our heroine is pushed too far by this troublesome young hussy, Emanuelle pulls her to the side and announces to this fool 'Now you're about to know what Emanuelle is all about!' Perhaps Monica should have asked somebody.

You can tell within about five minutes of watching this movie that this episode of Emanuelle isn’t a Joe D’Amato directed production. The first clue is that there is some logical flow to the story, something my man D’Amato really couldn’t have given a damn about. Plus the movie actually makes sense almost until the very end which is almost unheard of in a ‘Black Emanuelle’ flick. Another clue is that Laura Gemser doesn’t get naked until this movie has been on a good half hour, and even then it was completely gratuitous and only inserted because it was time to see Laura Gemser naked. It’s almost as if Miss Gemser went to director Guiseppe Vari and said “Dude, I’ve been on set like two weeks and haven’t gotten naked yet. This IS an Emanuelle picture right?” And to that point what we really have here is a Monica Zanchi picture as this girl gets to have all the fake sex, spend the most time naked, take the most showers and quite honestly has the most screen time. Though the force of nature that is Laura Gemser still manages to dominate the movie.

So the question, as always, would be is ‘Sister Emanuelle’ any good? If we judged Emanuelle flicks as independent entities, then probably not. However we here judge ‘Emanuelle’ movies against themselves and in that regard ‘Sister Emanuelle’ was spectacular. As we said before the story, at least as it is, manages to be somewhat logical though it does have a little bit of one crazy head scratching twist at its conclusion. The film was surprising in that it took Emanuelle being a nun deadly serious, and was not the Emanuelle girl on girl, handyman servicing, old nun turning out sex fest that I expected the movie to be, and that was a good thing. The film itself looks fantastic, Laura Gemser’s dark skin offset in that white habit looks incredible and even though we would never call Ms. Gemser the second coming of Katherine Hepburn her general demeanor seems to lend itself quite well to the role of playing this tortured nun.

Obviously, still being an Emanuelle movie, there were the oddball scene or two of total nonsense and then there was this eternal lesbian scene between Monica Zanchi and Dirce Funari with it being painfully clear that Ms. Funari really isn’t one for faking Sapphic delights. You could almost read the look on her face saying ‘why in the hell am I doing this?’

I go through the process of knocking off yet another Emanuelle flick only to find out that two or three more have popped up like cockroaches. It’s not like they’re making new ones, but it feels like Gemser, Tinti and D’Amato are jumping in a time machine, going back to 1979 and doing what they do. If Tinti and D’Amato weren’t dead that is. But Sister Emanuelle was a bit of pleasant surprise and probably the best Black Emanuelle movie I have seen to date.