Death Nurse

nick millard's 1987 sov slasher, death nurse, is a movie about a overweight nurse and his brother, who has this clinic where they take care of people, but what people don't know, that the nurse is a rampaging murderer with the thirst for blood to keep up their bills.

now may i want to ask, why do i hate this movie so much other than it's a shot on a camcorder movie? nothing literally happens at death nurse! it's poorly edited, it has absolutely no soundtrack, no good special effects, and you know what's the worst part? this film is supposed to be taken seriously.

death nurse is a movie so bad it's funny, but not funny bad, it's awful. we never get to see the actual characters get a little touch by a plastic meat cleaver, the results end for one second or probably zero, the sounds always cut off, that's how bad the editing is! don't get me to the acting either, they're not even trying to act, they're not trying to even try at all, there's too many scenes of the nurse having nightmares of this other character which is not edith from criminally insane, and many other footage that has nothing to do with the plot! f*ck this movie! the term "worst movie ever" isn't enough to describe this poor effort. nothing can. only a s*it brown would.

Death Nurse (1987)

Some more amateur gore filmmaking...this time emanating out of San Francisco, and the remarkable Millard family, whose history with exploitation movies dates back to the 1920s. Family patriarch S.S "Steamship" Millard was one of the original 'Forty Thieves' of the roadshow era, exhibiting fare like 'Is Your Daughter Safe?' and 'Pitfalls of Passion' across the states in the twenties, and earning a spell in San Quentin for his troubles. His son, Nick Millard, was a chip off the old block too, directing tons of trippy, dreamlike porn throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with the occasional foray into horror. Satan's Black Wedding (1976) might be the closest Millard ever came to making a legitimately 'good' film, but it is 1975's Criminally Insane (aka Crazy Fat Ethel) that remains his most well known and notorious movie.

By the late 1980s, Nick Millard had taken the step down to shooting on video, with senior cast members who look like they should be turning up to play bridge with the director's mother rather than starring in a gore film. 1987's Death Nurse retains Millard's heavyset star of Criminally Insane, Priscilla Alden, who brings a degree of professionalism and insult spitting malice to this tale of a murderous doctor, who along with his crazy fat nurse sister, runs a bogus medical clinic out of their suburban home. The clinic is, of course, a front for them to do away with sick, rich patients by suffocation, stabbing and one of the largest hypodermics seen outside of The Amazing Colossal Man.

Filmed at the director's own SF home (note all the film cans in the doctor's garage) and padded out with scenes from Criminally Insane, irregardless of the ten year plus age gap in the footage or the fact that Criminally Insane was done on film and Death Nurse on video. Meaning that whenever Nurse Alden has one of her bad dreams she is ten years younger and dreaming on film, only to then wake up in a shot on video world. Millard also put his mother Frances in Death Nurse, thoughtfully casting mum as a "drunk bitc*" who demands sex from the significantly younger Doctor. An aspect to the role that Mrs. Millard presumably enjoyed and took to heart....in the early 2000s, when she was in her nineties, Frances Millard became a porn star.

Good old Nick Millard, with his tiny, tiny budgets and crude lack of filmmaking finesse. He once again gives us a true groaner that somewhat entertains the viewer, if only because it's just so damn awful. Granted, the feeling that writer / director Millard does seem to have his tongue in his cheek helps to a degree, but that doesn't change the fact that this is just plain bad, bad, bad. The bargain basement gore is fun in its mind blowing tackiness, as is the acting that is phenomenally putrid right across the board.

Millard re-teams with his "Criminally Insane" lead Priscilla Alden, who here plays Edith Mortley, a sadistic nurse who works with her "doctor" brother Gordon (Albert Eskinazi) at a clinic which they run out of their suburban home. They're psychos AND they're scam artists, continuing to bill the state even after they've butchered their patients. Their trouble truly begins when the nosey Faith Chandler (Frances Millard, a. k. a. Nicks' mom) begins to poke around.

You can see that Nick knows damn well that he doesn't even have ONE hours' worth of story here, so he pads and pads the running time (even so, this only runs 58 minutes!) with archive footage from "Criminally Insane". Some of it is even used more than once. This is supposed to represent the dreams of the Edith character.

This is a singularly untalented cast, the kind that truly does make you want to look away. Millard also casts his wife Irmgard as the alcoholic, lusty patient Louise and even plays a part himself, that of the very ill Mr. Davis. Alden, at the least, does seem to be having fun.

"Death Nurse" is going to come off as a major waste of time to most people, even in light of its brief running time, but if you're anything like this viewer, its complete ineptitude should strike you as hilarious often enough to make this tolerable.

Five out of 10.

You know how in most god-awful B-movies, directors try (and usually fail) to come up with some kind of creative solution when they can't find the location or prop they're looking for? A boiler room can double as a prison, a school classroom can fill in for a police station, an ambulance can just be the production van after a quick paint-job: it's a lot of work, but it seems like one of the perks of low-budget filmmaking. "Death Nurse" director Nick Millard however takes the bold decision of simply not giving a damn. His screenplay requires some kind of clinic but screw it, his dilapidated house will probably be fine. I'm not sure which state this is set in, but please don't get sick over there. Whether you're an alcoholic, a terminal tuberculosis patient (who, I kid you not, is walked to the clinic) or a woman whose illness is never explained and probably just doesn't have a bed at home, you'll always be sent to some dirty, rat-infested house in the suburbs with just one doctor and one nurse (a death nurse at that). Oh yeah, that clinic whose patients without any exception are never seen again and where they call a regular kitchen knife a scalpel: if those people can't help out, who can?

Nick Millard is an incessantly intriguing filmmaker because he takes not caring to such a bizarre level: his only goal is to fill an hour of videotape, and he's not keen on hiding it. Almost a third of this movie is stock footage from Millard's earlier (and much better) work "Criminally Insane", but it's not even really stock footage: he literally just plays the movie on his TV and films the screen. Even with just forty minutes of new footage, the padding keeps on coming. Death nurse makes tea, the doctor digs a hole and then makes himself a sundae, that doesn't need to be shown in real time for an audience to understand but Millard takes no chances. Then suddenly, an hour of your life has vanished and you get the most ridiculous non-ending you've ever seen...thank God you also have "Death Nurse 2". Nick Millard is one hell of a drug.

This movie was horrible. It looked like bad porn! It was supposedly shot by the same party behind CRIMINALLY INSANE, but compared to that tarnished little jewel, this film is utter and complete trash. Unedited, unscripted, and un-acted, this piece of VHS video was obviously ripped clean out of the camcorder and thrown onto video store shelves without even the most rudimentary post-production tinkering.

The film supposedly takes place in a state-run "clinic," although the viewer soon wonders why the state would refer patients to a tacky tract house with cottage cheese ceilings and bad wood paneling.

Terrible. Simply terrible. And disappointing, too. Quite sad, actually. I'm crying right now because of this film. That's how bad it was.

This was not a real film. This was a home movie.