Beware, lady nurses in the Valley who happen to stand around 5’3″: A serial killer is targeting you. Be on the lookout for a guy who looks like Jim Henson after a visit to Sunglass Hut.
Nurse Carrie Lonegan (Janus Blythe, Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive) sure is. Her co-workers at the hospital — really just an office park with an overly fern-laden reception room — keep getting killed by the guy. He’s looking for a “Linda,” but slays regardless of actual name. Worse, Carrie’s new, naive roommate (Lise Romanoff), fresh to El Lay from Kansas City, gets hired there. Will the investigating cop be able to find the culprit before the roomies fall victim, too?
No one tell Carrie, but said crack police detective (co-director/co-writer John Howard) tries to solve the case by punching the following five terms into a TRS-80 database:
- LINDA
- NURSE
- STRANGLE
- BACKBONE
- KNIFE
And holy shit, it works!
As the killer, R. Eric Huxley and his pink shirt exude skeeze. If his extended, methodical torture of his tied-up prey in the third act feels a little, well, fetishy, that’s not accidental. Howard infuses the incidentally amusing Spine with the deliberate kink of his pornographic past: bondage videos with titles like Rope Burn.
For the record, Howard’s creative partner, Justin Simmonds, has no such wank-minded credits, much less any other credits. That’s de rigueur for these shot-on-video affairs. As is the great deal of ice cream truck tunes. —Rod Lott