Jess Franco's prolific, on-and-off working relationship with Swiss producer Erwin C. Dietrich throughout 
the mid-'70s, Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun (very loosely inspired by the epistolary 1669 collection) finds the filmmaker returning to the debauched Sadean historical drama format that had defined some of his earlier films like Justine and his nunsploitation epic The Demons. Blessed with beautiful Portugal scenery and more elaborate sets than usual for the time, Franco obviously invests himself heavily in this one with dedicated performances, perverse set pieces galore, and a dramatically sound narrative that, apart from a contrived happy ending that feels like a producer's demand, keeps the action moving swiftly for an hour and a half.
own sexual fantasies, and it soon transpires that the entire leadership within the convent walls is in fact devoted to Satan (Fux) whom 
they summon late at night performing sex rites. Soon the Inquisition is getting involved, with the hapless Maria making an easy target.
title on the gray market VHS circuit when interest in Franco was exploding in the '90s, Love Letters made its official English-friendly home video from Anchor Bay in the U.K. in 2004 with massive censorship cuts removing over six minutes of footage. (The full version remains banned there to this day.) In Germany Dietrich released it on DVD and Blu-ray in 2014 via his Ascot Elite imprint, the latter with audio options 
in German 5.1 DTS-HD and 2.0 Dolby Digital, English DTS-HD 5.1, Italian and Spanish 2.0 Dolby Digital mono, with optional English or Japanese subtitles. Extras include a 36-image gallery, trailers (this film, Love Camp, Doriana Gray, Voodoo Passion, Women in Cellblock 9, Greta the Mad Butcher, Swedish Nympho Slaves, Satanic Sisters, Wicked Women, Jack the Ripper, Downtown, and White Skin on Black Thighs), a Munich Film Museum appearance by Franco, Lina Romay, and Herbert Fux in 2001 (5m10s) with English or German subs, a "Memories of a Portuguese Nun" featurette (12m23s) with Dietrich, Franco, Fux, and Peter Baumgartner (with English, German, or French subs) chatting about Franco's directing technique and use of budgets with this film getting more resources than usual, and a 40m49s Franco audio interview from 1976 in German only. Image quality is excellent, taken from the original negative whose textless credits have been augmented with newly-created digital ones with those tell-tale glow effects. 
German option is still the best). The 2026 Blu-ray from Delirium (which has the film's title in Italian on the menu for some reason) comes from the same master as the German Blu-ray and looks identical, with 
DTS-HD MA 2.0 English mono and 5.1 plus 2.0 Dolby Digital English audio options with optional yellow English SDH subtitles. The "Memories" and Munich featurettes are both ported over here along with the German trailer, plus an "official trailer" (basically a film clip) and bonus trailers for Barbed Wire Dolls and Love Camp. A new audio commentary by Troy Howarth (which was accidentally omitted from the disc's first pressing, with replacements quickly sent out) does another adept job of placing the film in context within Franco's overall body of work and his tenure with Dietrich, as well as the backgrounds of the players, the oddness of that whole Satanic detour, the conventions of nunsploitation, and plenty more. 