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

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To mix similes, Sledgehammer moves like a snail through molasses rolling down a glacier. In other words, it’s slow. On purpose. And not in a “not much is happening here” way, but a “the director is using the slow-motion effect so much, we should check to see if he fell asleep” way.

That said, as the film played, my fascination with it grew to an obsession by the time it hit the last of its 87 minutes. Sledgehammer is remembered as one of the most successful of the shot-on-VHS slashers, and not just by virtue of being among the first. For all its ineptness, the seven-day wonder is oddly compelling and, against all odds, as hypnotic as it is illogical.

A boy is locked in a closet by his mother so that she and her no-good boyfriend can screw around in the living room. As they engage in foreplay, the grade-school youth somehow escapes, acquires the titular tool, and bashes in their heads. Fast-forward 10 years, and a group of throughly unappealing 20-somethings arrives at the same out-of-the-way cabin for a party weekend. You know what happens next, yet you’ll want to see it happen, anyway … provided you can stand the likes of seemingly interminable establishing shots.

What debuting director David A. Prior (Killer Workout) manages to do with so little may be accidental, but not entirely. His actors (headed by brother Ted Prior, Surf Nazis Must Die) are beyond help, and the script is as woefully lunkheaded — how else to explain the food-fight sequence, the chubby jock who licks people, the John Oates doppelgänger spurring the sexual advances of what passes for a hot blonde? However, the mood created by a creepy mask, a John Carpenter-esque synth score and dreamlike imagery lift the crude, homegrown effort from mere crap to at least really interesting crap. —Rod Lott

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Whether Blood Cult was the first movie made expressly for the home-video market as it claims does not matter. What does is that the Tulsa, Oklahoma-lensed picture is the perfect example for what shot-on-video projects do wrong and right — mostly wrong, starting with enough padding to rival a Tempur-Pedic mattress.

For example, a college student is horrified to find two chopped-off fingers in her cafeteria salad, and the scene fits into the plot. But what we don’t need is what director Christopher Lewis (son of actress Loretta Young) gives us beforehand: the coed being welcomed by the cafeteria worker; the two engaging in idle chit-chat; the coed selecting the broccoli and meat patty; the worker placing said meat patty on a tray; the coed selecting a diet Coke; the coed approaching the register; the cashier asking for $2.90; the cashier giving her a dime in change; the coed approaching the salad bar; the coed stirring the cottage cheese; the coed opting not to take any cottage cheese; the coed instead choosing your regular garden salad.

It’s all done to fill out a standard story of a black-gloved killer who carves up sorority girls with a glisteningly sharp cleaver and takes limbs as souvenirs. Investigating is Sheriff Wilbois (Charles Ellis, who returned for the following year’s sequel, Revenge), a rotund, elderly fella who looks like a TV pitchman for suspect Medicare supplements, and talks to himself a lot about the clues he finds. We call this “exposition.”

For shooting on Betacam with a $27,000 budget, Lewis achieves some interesting angles and tricks, but lacks in the other areas that carry equal weight, from credible performances to establishing tension. For the latter, witnessing the sheriff chow down on food from Arby’s while on stakeout does not count. Still, Blood Cult certainly is watchable — and not just for being a footnote in film history within the chapter titled “VHS Revolution and the Mom-and-Pop Video Store” — although saddled with the weakness that marks so many SOV efforts: a genuine love of movies that shows through, but not necessarily the know-how to pull one off. —Rod Lott

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Right from the start, The Night of the Devils is a room-clearer, announcing its intentions to the audience with a nightmarish montage of full-frontal nudity and graphic violence, complete with an exploding head and a ripped-out beating heart. “Don’t like it?” the film seems to say. “It’s best you leave now.”

Indeed, the Italian Gothic horror film from director Giorgio Ferroni (Mill of the Stone Women) is envelope-pushing for its time, rubbing your face in close-ups of unflinching gore and pressed flesh.

Gianni Garko (Devil Fish) literally stumbles into the story as Nicola, an amnesiac brought to a mental institution. Taking up most of the running time, a flashback reveals how he got there: Swerving to miss a woman in the woods, he experiences car trouble, and ventures to a nearby, rundown village for help. There, they keep the windows barred as protection against what plagues the night.

The Night of the Devils draws inspiration from Aleksei Tolstoy’s “The Wurdulak,” a story that also informed the Boris Karloff-starring segment of Mario Bava’s 1963 anthology film, Black Sabbath. The similarity isn’t readily apparent until the flashback begins. Whereas the Bava adaptation feels a little long in the tooth, this feature-length version ironically is the more successful telling. —Rod Lott

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On Christmas Eve 1950, the only thing roasting at the Wilfred Butler mansion was Wilfred Butler himself! Mysteriously dying by fire, he left his estate to his only surviving family member, grandson Jeffrey (James Patterson, In the Heat of the Night), with explicit instructions to leave the house untouched. Twenty years later, Jeffrey and his attorney (Patrick O’Neal, The Stepford Wives) — neither of whom has stepped foot inside the place — come to town to negotiate its sale.

Coinciding with their yuletide arrival, the sleepy small town is terrorized by an escaped lunatic out for revenge, citing the ol’ crimes-commited-years-earlier reason. What director Theodore Gershuny (Sugar Cookies) attempts to pass off as suspense is actually poor story structure. By not revealing pertinent facts until the second half, viewers are left to wonder just what the holy hell is going on.

That’s why the back half of this mouse-quiet shocker is better, if not gorier. The extended asylum-revolution flashback is genuinely disturbing, as is the finale. Alternately stylish and amateurish, Silent Night, Bloody Night is often slow-moving, but effective in building atmosphere that’s palpable even in the shoddy public-domain prints.

Over the years, I’ve found it’s a movie that improves a bit with each viewing — all but its gratuitous Mary Woronov voice-over — once you come to peace with what it is and what it is not. And it is most definitely not Silent Night, Deadly Night, so don’t confuse the two. —Rod Lott

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