Vintage 1972 La Nonne et les 7 Pécheresses Belgium Movie Poster, The Big Bust Out, Crucified Girls of San Ramon 🖼️

Size: 22 x 14 inches

🔓 What Do a Belgian Cinema, an Italian Nunsploitation Reel, and Roger Corman Have in Common?

This poster. Every so often a single sheet of paper turns out to be a crossroads where three film cultures met, and this is one of them. It is the Belgian theatrical poster for the 1972 Italian-German exploitation picture Io monaca... per tre carogne e sette peccatrici — the film English-speaking collectors know as The Big Bust Out and, under its most lurid alias, Crucified Girls of San Ramon. Across the top the paper carries its two Belgian titles in flame-red: the French La Nonne et les 7 Pécheresses and, along the base, the Flemish De Non en de 7 Zondaressen. This is genuine new old stock, unused distributor archive paper, and everything described here comes straight from the poster in the photographs.

🎬 The Film the Poster Was Printed to Sell

The picture is a piece of early-1970s Eurocult at its most unashamed: a women-in-prison escape story in which seven women trick a nun into helping them break out of a desert prison, only to find the outside world holds worse dangers than the one they fled. It was directed under the name Richard Jackson — the international pseudonym of the Austrian filmmaker Ernst Ritter von Theumer — and it ran, as the paper proudly notes, in Scope and Technicolor. The billing across the poster names its leads plainly: Tony Kendall, Monica Teuber, and William Berger, all familiar faces to anyone who follows the Italian genre cinema of the era.

What lifts this particular title out of the ordinary run of exploitation pictures is what happened to it next. Its United States distribution was picked up by New World Pictures — the studio founded by Roger Corman, the single most influential figure in American drive-in and grindhouse cinema — which brought it to American screens as The Big Bust Out in early 1973. That Corman connection is exactly the kind of documented production history that gives a poster like this real collector weight beyond its artwork alone: it ties a small Belgian print to one of the most collected names in genre film.

🇧🇪 Why the Belgian Poster Looks Like Nothing Else

Here is the heart of why Belgian film posters are their own collecting world. Belgium is the one country that never simply reprinted the artwork of the film's home country. Instead its distributors commissioned their own original local artwork for nearly every imported film, and printed it in Belgium's own distinctive oversized format — a size and shape used almost nowhere else. The result is that the Belgian poster for a film is frequently a completely different image from the Italian, French, or American campaigns for the very same picture. Collectors prize these precisely because each one is effectively a unique piece of commissioned commercial art rather than a copy.

This sheet also carries the other hallmark of the Belgian affiche: dual-language titling, French and Flemish together, reflecting Belgium's two great language communities on a single poster. That is a detail you will never find on a poster printed for a single-language market, and it is one of the quickest ways to recognize — and love — a genuine Belgian original.

🎨 What the Artwork Shows

The image is pure exploitation-poster drama: two women locked in a desperate struggle across a sun-bleached desert, one lunging with a blade, the other wheeling back with a raised weapon, a hard-shadowed prison town crouched on the horizon behind them. The red display lettering, the painterly figures, and the harsh desert palette all do the single job a poster of this kind was made to do — stop a passer-by on a Belgian street and pull them toward the box office. The Cosmopolis distributor imprint sits quietly at the top corner, the mark of the Belgian house that put the film into the country's cinemas.

📽️ Out of the Cosmopolis Films Archive

This poster survives because it was never used. It comes from a single Belgian collection assembled in 2007 out of the surviving archive of Cosmopolis Films, a now-defunct Belgian film distributor — a cache of unsold, unhung distributor stock that was saved as a whole before that piece of exhibition history could be broken up and scattered. Posters like this were printed to advertise films to Belgian cinemas, not to be sold to the public, which is exactly why so few of them survive at all: the ordinary fate of a movie poster was to be pasted up, torn down, and thrown away. What was held back in a distributor's own archive is the rare exception — paper that went straight from the press into storage and stayed there.

📅 About the two dates: the poster was printed for the film's own cinema release. 2007 is only the year the surviving distributor archive was gathered and kept together - it is not a printing or reprint date.

🖼️ Ways to Live With It

• 🖼️ Float it in a slim black frame and let the bold red lettering and desert palette carry a wall on their own.
• 🎬 Group it with other 1970s Eurocult, grindhouse, or drive-in memorabilia for a genre-cinema gallery wall.
• 📼 Hang it beside a Roger Corman or New World Pictures shelf as the European chapter of that story.
• 🛋️ Anchor a home cinema, den, or game room with a genuine piece of exploitation-era history.
• 🎁 Give it to the collector who already tracks Corman-era distribution and will recognize the title on sight.

🎁 Who Collects These

This one lands with several kinds of collector at once. There is the Eurocult and women-in-prison genre specialist, who knows this exact title and its aliases. There is the Roger Corman / New World Pictures completist, for whom the US distribution history is the hook. And there is the Belgian poster specialist, who collects the format itself for its locally commissioned artwork and dual-language design. A single sheet that speaks to all three is an unusually versatile piece of paper.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

What film is this poster actually for?

The 1972 Italian-German exploitation film Io monaca... per tre carogne e sette peccatrici, known in English as The Big Bust Out and as Crucified Girls of San Ramon. The poster carries its French and Flemish Belgian release titles.

What is the Roger Corman connection?

Corman's New World Pictures acquired the film's US distribution and released it to American theaters as The Big Bust Out in early 1973 — a documented tie between this Belgian print and one of the most collected names in genre cinema.

Why is a Belgian poster different from the Italian or American one?

Belgian distributors commissioned their own original artwork rather than reprinting the source country's campaign, and printed it in Belgium's own oversized format with both French and Flemish titles — so the Belgian sheet is frequently a wholly different image from every other country's.

Is this an original or a reprint?

An original piece of unused new old stock from the film's Belgian theatrical release — distributor archive paper, not a modern reproduction.

Where did it come from?

From a single Belgian collection assembled in 2007 out of the surviving archive of the Cosmopolis Films distributorship, preserved intact rather than dispersed.

🎞️ One Film, a Dozen Names — and Why That Happened

Part of the fun of a title like this is untangling its many identities. Between its Italian original, its French and Flemish Belgian titles, its lurid Crucified Girls of San Ramon alias, and its Corman-era American release as The Big Bust Out, this single film wore a small wardrobe of names across the world. That was not unusual for the Eurocult cinema of the early 1970s: films were financed across borders, sold territory by territory, and re-titled by each distributor to suit local taste and local censors, so the "same" picture could look and sound like a different film in every country it played. For collectors, that tangle is a feature, not a bug — each national poster is a separate artifact of the same movie's strange, well-traveled life, and the Belgian sheet, with both its French and Flemish titles printed together, captures two of those identities on a single piece of paper.

📦 How a Poster Like This Was Meant to Live and Die

It helps to picture what this poster was actually for. Printed in Belgium's own oversized format, it was made to hang in and around cinemas — in lobbies, in glass display cases, pasted to hoardings — for the few weeks the film played, then be stripped down and discarded when the next attraction arrived. That short, disposable working life is exactly why so few survive in unused condition: the poster's whole job was to be used up. This one never was. It went from the distributor's press into storage and stayed there, which is why it can be enjoyed today as the bright, complete piece of commercial art it was drawn to be rather than a battered, salvaged fragment. Flat, light, and simple to frame, it asks only for a slim moulding, acid-free materials, and a spot out of direct sun to carry on exactly as it is.

✨ Why It Matters

A poster like this is worth having because it is a genuine survivor of a kind of paper that was almost never meant to survive. It ties a small Belgian cinema print to Roger Corman's New World Pictures, it carries its own locally commissioned artwork and its two Belgian titles, and it comes out of a distributor archive that was saved whole in 2007 rather than broken apart. The entire surviving supply of this material sits together in that one collection — and the copies with a future guaranteed are simply the ones collectors take home. Own this one, and you are keeping a real piece of exploitation-film history that would otherwise have vanished the ordinary way: pasted up, torn down, and thrown away.