Death Nurse

This is one of those very poorly made,straight to VHS movies from the 80s.I don't know where to begin with this.Well we have two siblings.Edith and Gordon. Edith is a nurse and Gordon is a doctor.They open this clinic (and it doesn't even look like one I might add) and we find out that they kill the patients for their health care and money.The movie is about 60 minutes in length.

This movie is just awful. The acting is really bad,the quality is bad.And when they transfer it,a frame can get stuck and it makes it look really bad.Plus,they extend scenes for way too long.For example,Gordon digging a whole takes almost two or three full minutes then it cuts to him eating ice cream.Not to mention that the actors are all from Nick Millard's other movies like Criminally Insane.So a third of the movie is nothing but clips and scenes from Criminally Insane,and we're suppost to believe that these are Edith's dreams.

Just stay away from this movie.

I didn't even know this movie existed until recently and now that I've seen it, I know why! What a horrible, hideous, god-awful waste of time and effort this one is! Just like it's predecessor "Crazy Fat Ethel 2" "Death Nurse" is shot on video. It is also a pseudo-sequel to "Criminally Insane". Talk about milking a story to death! Obviously Nick Millard aka Nick Phillips was totally devoid of all thoughts and ideas at this point and simply decided to recycle the same old lousy story for a third time. To make matters even worse, he put even less effort into this "film" (and I use that term loosely) than in the previous sequel. Once again we get recycled, crappy footage from "Criminally Insane" and a rapidly aging Priscilla Alden cast in the lead. The storyline in this 'film' is not even remotely related to that of "Criminally Insane" and Priscilla Alden's character has a name change which makes all of the footage from "Criminally Insane" seem awkwardly out of place. There is nothing about this "film" that makes any sense and I really do not get the point of wasting time making it!

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.

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.

The movie starts out with Priscilla Alden playing as Edith, who works as a nurse, lives with her brother in a suburban house. They kill new patients to keep up the bill for their state care. Okay, the plot is decent, but that's the only good thing about the film. Alden also has a nice creepy laugh.

I was very disappointed by this film. It's simply one of Nick's worst movies, and I felt like I got the biggest b*tch slap in the face. I mean what happened? This film is so incredibly boring that I couldn't get along with the plot any longer. The opening and ending titles, this movie doesn't have any. It's only footage that he ripped from Criminally Insane. There is very little gore, and very little kills. The whole movie itself is poorly edited, there isn't any originality into the sets, the sets were only re-used from Satan's Black Wedding for this movie. Nick, what were you thinking? It doesn't take this much to make a simple horror movie. You put effort on your other movies, they had nice quality, good sound, and it looked it you took time to make those movies. This looks like some crappy home video you and your family recorded, put it together with two VHS's, and sold it off as a "horror" film. Not even I would enjoy it.