Night Call Nurses

This is a very simple film, as it’s basically a day-to-day account on the lives of three nurses, told in an exploitation way. These three nurses are the mentally-unstable Barbara (Patty Byrne), the sexpot Janis (Alana Stewart) and the black political revolutionary Sandra (Mittie Lawrence). All this in the change of the 60’s, as Barbara has to deal with trying to fall in love with her hippie psychiatrist and not fall victim to a stalking nurse, while Janis falls in love with a trucker addicted to speed and Sandra is trying to sneak out a black revolutionary from the hospital she works in.

This movie starts off promisingly enough, with a naked woman throwing herself off a window. Instead of her body falling to the ground, a doll does, breaking into pieces on the ground. From that opening sequence, I thought I was about to watch a long-lost giallo or something, But nope, this is basically just an exploitation film, and not a very good one at that. Not that it’s not entertaining, mind you, but it’s just has so many faults that it’s kind of hard to take it seriously. For starters, the movie is dated as hell. Just like Rebel Without A Cause and Easy Rider, this is a product of it’s time. The problem is that this movie is nowhere near as good as those previously mentioned. This comes to a particular light during the ‘group therapy’ session Barbara attends, where the psychologist asks the group to strip off of their clothes so that they can feel what real freedom is like. In our ridiculously PC world, where people will sue you for sneezing on their shoes, I couldn’t imagine something like that passing. I can’t get women naked to work in my movies, I can’t imagine something like it in group therapy.

This particularly bad storyline goes into even crazier territory as it’s revealed that the stalker nurse is *SPOILER* a transvestite! The transvestite attacks the doctor and Barbara, and then Barbara convinces the transvestite to help save the doctor’s life… AND THAT’S ALL THAT THEY MENTION ABOUT IT! For no reason they just forget about this particular plot and move on to the most entertaining part of the whole movie, a sequence where Sandra and Janis bond together and rescue the political revolutionary in the hospital. This rescue leads to one of the most ludicrous car chases ever, with some of the worst continuity I’ve ever seen in my life. It goes from day on the exteriors of the truck to night on the interior shots of the truck. And even more ludicrous, they get chased by cops. One of the black dudes throws a bunch of dinamite stuck together, enough to blow up a house, and it explodes under the car. The explosion only causes the front of the car to blow smoke and the cop to come out in black and give the finger. I guess I would expect the guy to get turned into KFC, but I guess I was wrong.

Wow I’ve written a lot, considering this movie clocks under 80 minutes, with one of the cheesiest happy endings ever. Like I said, the transvestite subplot does not get resolved, and when they finish rescuing the revolutionary, it just goes into a montage of the three nurses posing happily. What the hell? Did they just give up and decided to take Polaroids? So yeah this movie is bullshit, but it is entertaining, and I can’t think of any single moment where I was bored. So watch it if you want to watch an average exploitation movie, just don’t expect high art.