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DEATH
NURSE
PLOT
Edith Mortley and her brother Gordon run a state-funded medical
facility out of their home. They take in patients, murder them,
bill the government for their "funerals", feed pieces of the bodies
to the rats in their basement, and then feed the rats to new
patients. Things go smoothly for the demented siblings until a
curious inspector threatens to end their cycle of death.
REVIEW
For the record, this is the third installment in the series of
films that Steven Millard directed featuring everyone's favorite
overweight psycho, Priscilla Alden. A "big" plus to this one is
that Alden is given something else to do with her (minimal) talents...
her portrayal of a psychotic, foul-mouthed nurse vs. a
compulvise-eating psycho isn't much of a stretch, but let's just
say that she's a bit more animated this time around. Besides,
everyone else in "Death Nurse" is so awful that watching Alden kill
them all is actually a treat.
Most of the cast from "Crazy Fat Ethel II" (a.k.a. "Criminally
Insane II") returns, and the same porn-set house is used. This
one is also similiar in the fact that it's SOV and follows the
same sixty-minute formula complete with "dream sequences" that
use footage from the original "Criminally Insane" (to his credit,
Millard lightened up on the re-use of that footage in this movie...
there actually IS more of a plot). All of this leads me to believe
that this was shot back-to-back with CFE 2 and Death Nurse 2 on
some morbid, sunny California weekend in 1987.
What really scored points with me was the almost cheerful ineptness
that "Death Nurse" wears proudfully on it's chest. The fact that it's
a bad movie is sort of the point, and I was more than game to play along.
As I said before, with the exception of Alden, the talent here is awful...
not Edith Massey awful, but downright mannequin...the one exception
is the actress playing one of the patients who is there for alcoholism...
she doesn't speak English very well and spends the entire movie in
a nightie with her boobs falling out...THAT is a SOV actress. The bad
production only adds to the absurdity of the whole thing. In a very badly
edited scene, Edith and Gordon perform a heart transplant with the innards
of their poor pooch...they drop the heart on the floor and a cat "steals"
it, which leads to a hilarious chase around the dining room table
(yes, they perform operations in the dining room!).
GORE
Higher body count than "Crazy Fat Ethel II" and the death scenes are
better concieved (that's not saying a whole lot)....Edith proves to
have a liking for the butcher knife, so we get a lot of splashy stabbings.
One effect attempts to show a bunch of knives sticking out of a dead torso.
SOUNDTRACK
A lot of the same stuff from "Criminally Insane" is used again.
BOTTOM LINE
You'd better have a high tolerance for blatently bad SOV slasher movies
to grab any enjoyment out of this sucker. I find most SOV's to be really
tiresome, and thought that "Death Nurse" (in it's thankfully short 60
minutes) was one of the more entertaining ones. The premise isn't a
bad one...in fact, in more capable hands, this would make a pretty good
black comedy...but you get what you get.
Review
By: The ScareMaker
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