Death Nurse (1987)

I began by hating what I was seeing in this film. I was thinking, "For anyone who thinks Ray Dennis Steckler makes boring, inept pictures, you must see this." I felt inclined to turn it off after the first pointless shot of a character eating icecream and the first irrational use of a zoom lense. However, I stuck around and found myself sort of entertained. That's not, however, a whole-hearted endorsement, I assure you.

The film is more or less pointless. There is very little in the way of dramatic tension. Edith is a nurse running her own clinic from what is obviously her suburban home. Ill, sometimes terminally ill, vulnerable patients are brought in and swiftly dispatched. Sometimes Edith smother's them, sometimes her slow-witted brother performs 'surgery'. It's a euthanasia clinic, except the patients aren't aware of it.

Nor is social services, represented entirely by Louise, a woman in her 80s (Millard's aunt, I guess). She gives the film the closest thing to dramatic tension, since she starts snooping. However, nobody is really keen on investigating when she's easily dispatched.

Then the movie ends. It's a series of killings with no real purpose and no gore either; so what's the point? Well, the point is that it's funny. That's when I started to enjoy it: when I realized it's a black comedy. I figured this out when one surgery set piece consisted of a heart transplant, using a dog's heart. But when the heart drops to the floor (oops, butter fingers!) Edith's cat grabs the heart and they run around the surgical table in circles trying to get the heart back.

There are a lot of pitch black comedy set pieces, involving digging up corpses, feeding rats to old ladies, surgery with kitchen knives, etc.. I have to be honest: I like Millard's sense of humour.

There is also unintentional humour. This is as low-budget as horror films get. It's filmed with a camcorder and I'm guessing it was edited using two VCRs. Whenever the brother has to bury someone, we see the exact same footage of him digging a few shovels from a little patch of earth. There are even more egregious examples of repeated footage. Louise says, "I want to see Mr. Davis!" Edith replies, "Go back to your room, you nosy old bitch." Louise replies, "I demand to see Mr. Davis!" Then we get the exact same shot of Edith saying, "Go back to your room, you nosy old bitch." Millard also makes Jess Franco's use of the zoom lens seem perfectly reasonable.

My favourite bit, however, is Edith's dream sequences. What DOES a serial killer dream about? Well, her murders from previous Nick Millard movies, for one. A lot of footage is used from Criminally Insane to pad the runtime, making me wonder, if Millard didn't have enough story for a movie, why make one? These can't be very profitable. But I digress. She also dreams of cemeteries and strolling through the park in the gaudiest, frumpiest well-dressed-fat-woman outfit available, in a sort of avant-garde montage.

It's hard to recommend such an amateurish film for average viewing. However, if you're having a get-together with some like-minded friends, it would be an amusing film to put on in the background of the party. The black humour would work very well in that context.

2/10