L'infirmière de l'hosto du régiment

When it came to low-brow Italian sex comedy, Nadia Cassini was probably the third most famous actress in 1970's Italy after Edwige Fenech and Gloria Guida. But unlike with the other two, none of her movies has yet received a legitimate English-language DVD release. Physically, the three actresses were quite different--Fenech was big-breasted and voluptuous, Guida was a petulant Lolita, while Cassina had a lithesome dancer's body (she, unfortunately, does one horrid disco song and dance number here)--but what they all had in common though was an ability to constantly lose their clothing and drive men everywhere mad with lust.

In this film, Cassini is a singer/showgirl who poses as a nurse to recover some stolen paintings, which for some reason are hidden in a military insane asylum.Lino Banfi (who else?) plays the head doctor. He's hot to get in the new nurse's panties because his own wife (Nieves Navarro) is both frigid and perpetually naked. (He tries to give her a Chinese aphrodisiac at one point, but his plan goes awry and he ends up being cuckolded bothby Alvaro Vitali and a delivery boy who's even more unattractive than Vitali or Banfi). Vitali, wearing an afro fright-wig, plays a painter who I think is one of the patients, but he is somehow able nevertheless to land Carmen Russo (a real-life Italian version of "Jessica Rabbit") as his "nude model". (I think this movie sets some kind of record for casting really hot women and really ugly guys). Rounding out the cast is future porn star Karin Schubert as the mistress of Cassini's art thief employer.

All the women in this movie get naked, natch, but unfortunately so does Banfi. The director Mariano Laurenti was less talented than more well-known Italian comedy directors like Sergio Martino or Pasquale Campanile Festa, but, on the other hand, he was definitely better than Michele Tarantini or some of the other hacks who worked in the genre. As these movies, go this is pretty average. It might be worth seeing simply for the frequently unclad female cast. And the comedy, while not very funny, is not as annoying as it could be.

This lame-brained comedy (which I saw under the title 'Nurse at the Military Madhouse') is set in a military psychiatric hospital and makes the Three Stoodges look like high-grade intellectual fare. Much of the comedy is pure low-grade slapstick - doors slammed in faces, people tripping over buckets of water or being punched in the privates ... you get the idea. The 'story' such as it is, involves some valuable paintings hidden in the hospital.

Nadia Cassini performs an embarrassingly awful song 'n' dance number about halfway through. She is admittedly easily on the eye - as is former giallo queen Nieves Navarro (billed here as Susan Scott)who contributes a couple of fairly unsexy (for her) nude scenes. Even so, these provide the only possible reason for watching this strange little movie.