At once inert and incredible, the shot-on-video Death Nurse is a true test of pain tolerance among movie watchers. The good news is it runs exactly 57 minutes and 15 seconds; the bad news is it runs exactly 57 minutes and 15 seconds.
Fake nurse Edith Mortley (Priscilla Alden) helps her wannabe-MD brother, Gordon (Albert Eskinazi), run the Shady Palms Clinic, which writer/director Nick Philips of both Criminally Insane/Crazy Fat Ethel films (with which this shares cast, crew and mismatching footage) makes no attempt to hide is a hideously decorated condominium. The Mortley sibs perform “surgery” on patients (read: kill them for kicks), either bury them in the backyard or feed them to the rats in the basement; and then bill Medicare for services rendered.
If Gordon isn’t stabbing knives into one patient (whose mouth is shut with mere masking tape), Edith is smothering another with a pillow (and her considerable girth). Shady Palms also houses a female patient who’s battling alcoholism (Irmgard Millard, Philips’ wife), but she’s considerably safer because Gordon is balling her in exchange for sips from Edith’s bottle of sherry.
Family members and authorities start to get suspicious just before the flick ends, with no movement toward any level of resolution. Imagine a TV show fading to a commercial break and never coming back … well, until the following year’s Death Nurse 2, that is.
This no-budget effort — apologies to the word “effort” — is inept in every aspect imaginable. Philips (aka Nick Millard) includes sequence after sequence of interminable non-action that have nothing to do with anything other than padding the running time to a feature length, and he fails even at that. The blood of victims sometimes is orange, like tomato soup stirred with milk. Such a meal possesses more character. —Rod Lott