Death Nurse 1 & 2 (1987-88)

 

Director: Nick Millard

Screenplay: Nick Millard

Cast: Priscilla Alden as Nurse Edith Mortley; Albert Eskinazi as Doctor Gordon Mortley; Royal Farros as Mr. Powell/Charles Bedowski; Frances Millard as Charity Chandler/Faith Chandler; Irmgard Millard as Louise Kagel/Brownie; Nick Millard as John Davis/Sergeant David Gallagher; Fred Sarra as Lieutenant Cal Bedowski

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

You son of a bitch, you got my bag!

Death Nurse is made by Nick Millard, who was one of many independent genre directors in the sixties and seventies, making films like Criminally Insane (1975) until the two Death Nurse films in the late eighties, where he joined many who saw the advantages of the shot-on-video boom in video recording cameras and making ultra-low budget films as this pair. About a homicidal nurse and her doctor brother, the film does not have to worry about a real hospital set, just the appropriate costumes and set around a rest home named Shady Palms which is clearly shot in someone's own home.

Shady is apt as they openly mistreat the patients, performing operations without anaesthesia to learn how to, smothering tuberculosis patients, which consists of coughing into a cloth, with a pillow, and burying the bodies in the back garden or leaving them in the garage for the rats to feed on. Death Nurse is not going to be for everyone, the understatement of the year even as someone who liked the film, absolutely not a film you would recommend to anyone but those open to the film's limitations or with a taste already there for films like this where you get a prolonged scene of a man getting a snack out the kitchen, where you can hear air conditioners in certain scenes and they use bread knives in place of scalpels. Baring the budget and silly tone, this does get into something uncomfortably real of medical malpractice of medical staff deliberately killing patients, sadly something even a silly movie like this is not making up the existence of, even if this is thankfully a work whose mistakes and quirks soften the reality. Here these siblings, alongside the brother wanting to practice his surgery skills, get money from having patients sent to their home they can quickly dispose of. The only patient seemingly safe is Louise (one of two roles over the two films by the director's wife Irmgard Millard), the patient meant to kick her alcoholism only to get at Edith's bottle of sherry for sexual favours with the brother she is glad to provide.

It is an absurd experience, like a John Waters premise just needing a shove in the right direction and instead just charmingly eccentric, becoming more of a rough job being a doctor who kills, especially when you need to dig out a victim from the back garden as the social worker wants to visit him. The stilted nature of the film, including an almost complete lack of music score, is potentially off-putting, but it is perversely charming, following the banality of being a killer and how boring it really would be even in mind to Death Nurse's obvious limitations, with the closest thing to a score being a brief electronic drone in dream sequences, like it is going to turn into a random number radio broadcast. These dream scenes re-use footage from Criminally Insane, with Priscilla Alden the same lead between them both, always a sign of a no-budget film with a foot into the peculiar. Considering Criminally Insane follows Alden as a woman released from a mental asylum who kills to not be prevented from eating food she wants, it presents an idiosyncratic attempt to build a new film from new footage only James Bryan and Renee Harmon topped by doing it over and over again in the eighties.

Death Nurse 2 continues as before with the issue ending the last film being swiftly resolved with a murder weapon, and keeps the tone up with a prolonged scene of making a cup of tea after murdering someone. It feels like the second half, actually, of one whole film, more so as this does extend the reuse of Millard's Criminally Insane again for an absurd repetition, as alongside new footage from that film you get the same meat cleaver scene in full from that film as used already in the first Death Nurse. It feels fully a piece from a larger work when the pair are combined, as one hour films made into a two horror one, where this escalates the problems of the leads' murder spree by introducing Brownie (also Irmgard Millard), the homeless woman armed with a giant knife in her shopping trolley, and Misha, the self styled philosopher taken off the street for ranting under the mayor's window about abolishing income taxes and the evils of socialism. It feels the same as the previous film, continues the absurdity of the previous film, such as someone being chased in circles around the couch by a homeless woman with a knife, and trying to introduce twin sisters in the plot line to bring back an actress, related to Millard. Throughout both films, the word "bitch" is the most prominent aspect of the film, used in a variety of ways alongside close-ups of as Priscilla Alden scowling. You can even hear the edits of scenes, interconnecting two different actors in conversation in the same scene, due to the traffic outside cutting in and out in time, which adds to the humour of both films.

It ends naturally on the downfall being as banal and gross as human matter being brought out onto the lawn by damn rats, and whether these films are actually watchable, as already stated, is only if you have a taste for such films. It is deeply silly, at times a slog between them, but I have nothing but admiration for the attempt.