Killer Nurse

Another of Ulli Lommel's "real life" killer films, this one based on the killings of Charles Cullen. Most of Lommel's recent films are of the "rinse, lather, repeat" mode, where scenarios are repeated for the length of the film. Here's the cycle in this one: There is a title explaining why some patient is in the hospital. Cullen then wheels the patient into a chapel and talks to her for a while about very odd things. Then he wheels her into some locked area of the hospital and apparently kills her and then fondles the dead body while hallucinating about a nurse who is frequently topless. This is repeated several times. And then there are "explanations" and "twists" that bring us to the ending.

"Killer Nurse" has what we've come to expect from Ulli's recent work -- long, repetitive scenes with what appears to be partially improvised dialog and all the stuff you might be interested in seeing (nudity and violence) either blurred out, filmed in poor lighting, or with bizarre editing, all designed so that you can't actually see any of it. Personally, I have an odd and inexplicable affection for his films -- possibly because I find a couple of his usual actresses to be very attractive -- but it's very hard to recommend anybody spend any money on this flick.

This won't take long.

Ulli Lommel, who passed away in 2017, made a lot of really, really dodgy films throughout his career. Zodiac Killer, Julia 17 and B. T. K. Killer spring to mind. Bella Lugosi kept making films long after the creative juices had ceased to flow. He must have suspected his situation. Lommel continued to make films long after the creative juices ceased to flow but he seems to have been totally unaware of being engulfed in an artistic drought.

He was an associate of Andy Warhol but even their combined genius wasn't enough to produce sustained great cinema. Cocaine Cowboys was as bad as anything they produced individually.

Anyway, Killer Nurse. It is a cheap and nasty piece of cinematography. Lommel confuses lazy and distorted filming with artiness.

The film is one of a number of true stories he used as the basis for his movies. Scenes are frequently out of focus, shot on bizarre angles or are simply devoid of any sense at all. Lommel no doubt saw this as dexterous artistry. To the viewer, even a sympathetic one, it is just a jumble of almost disconnected 'visions'. There is insufficient coherence to call it a narrative.

Killer Nurse was made in 2008. I'm guessing that it is supposed be saying something about Charles Cullen, a nurse who came to light in 2003 as a murderer of 40 patients, perhaps 400 according to some!

Netflix are in production of a movie, The Good Nurse, based on the same events. Perhaps wait for this to come out.