Long before Volver or All About My Mother, Almodóvar directed a somewhat less notable, more offbeat film, Dark Habits.

The plot is rather thin, focusing on night club singer Yolanda. When Yolanda finds her boyfriend dead from a drug overdose, she seeks refuge in a convent. However, the convent is not all that it seems to be....

This is where the film diverges on its own path. In a typical nunsploitation movie, the nuns would be hot lesbians who strip down and whip each other or masturbate with candles. In Dark Habits some of the nuns are lesbians... but the similarities end there.

The film enters the world of the bizarre. Let's start with their names: Sister Snake, Sister Manure, Sister Damned, and my personal favorite, Sister Rat of the Sewers.

The abbess explains their strange choice in names: "One of the bases of our community is self-mortification and humiliation. That's why we have such bizarre-sounding names: Sister Manure, Sister Rat, Sister Damned, Sister Snake. Man will not be saved until he realizes he is the most despicable being ever created."

There are other odd goings on in the convent. Some of the nuns are drug addicts. Sister Rat of the Sewers is the author of several best selling erotic fiction novels, and what the heck is that tiger doing in the garden?

The convent survives on the donations of a wealthy patron whose daughter was a nun in the order before she passed away. However, the nuns get just barely enough to keep the convent open. Abbess Julia has to pawn the order's holy icons in order to score enough cash for drugs.

When the heiress threatens to stop supporting the convent, Abbess Julia devises a plan to blackmail her.

The film overall is rather slow-paced and weird. The nuns are the quirkiest characters I've seen in a movie in a long time. Despite this, it does have its charm.

Sister Rat of the Sewers steals the show. She is the sweetest, humblest nun, yet she is the seedy mastermind behind the steamiest erotic fiction on the market. It is just such an odd combination.

It's also weird seeing nuns shoot up as casually as they would bless themselves.

Overall, the film is charming, but not truly moving and not really erotic in any way either.

Almodóvar doesn't seem to get the idea of monastic life quite right, like a stranger looking in, he makes observations, but doesn't understand the motivations.

He confuses humility with humiliation. He also misunderstands the idea of living among sinners. The scriptures say "Sick people don't need a doctor." So, Jesus lived among sinners: prostitutes, tax collectors, and poor people, but he never sinned himself.

In the movie, Abbess Julia and her nuns become sinners to be among the people they are trying to help. She sleeps with lesbians, she shoots up with drug addicts and in the process, she gets caught up in the deed of sinning and the goal of salvation falls by the wayside. Either Abbess Julia, or Almodóvar himself, forgets that the nuns are supposed to be among the sinners, not become sinners.

The movie ends with a party in honor of the abbess with Yolanda as the star attraction. The future of the convent hangs in doubt as the heiress on the verge of abandoning her patronage, and the Vatican is likely to have its own say about the atypical nuns. However, there is no doubt about the future of Almodóvar's career, as he went on to several successful, critically acclaimed films.