Amongst the thousands of physical copies of films I've accumulated and will likely be buried underneath, I have a short but steadily growing list that I set aside just for the purpose of eventually watching for this site. The criteria for inclusion is admittedly pretty loose, but one of the more recent guidelines I've tried to adhere to is this: the fewer references I can find to a film on the internet or in books, the higher up the list it goes. It did cross my mind that maybe the reason no one's written about certain movies is because they're so impenetrable, so beyond rational explanation as to exist in a place where they cannot be touched by words. I also knew that, eventually, I would come face to face with and be challenged by one of those movies. The day has come. Furious is calling me out.
Howdeedooit
At first, all I could remember were fur and rocks and, for some reason, I couldn't get the theme to SCTV's "Great White North" out of my head, so I wrote it down. Then it was spinning tusks and mysterious boxes, so I wrote that down too. Then, nunchuck deaths and killer chefs, sudden chickens and doggie kickin', beach dismission and pork exposition, skeleton flames and astral planes -- I wrote everything down. Out of six attempted viewings, I had successfully seen the entire thing once, written twenty paragraphs over four and a half pages and I'd fallen asleep five times. That's not just math; that's Furious math.
Jan and Dean and Simon and Tennille
Lest there be any misconception that I was bored to sleep by Furious, this was not the case -- it's just that trying to mentally organize this much nonsense is exhausting and emergency shutdown was the only option my brain gave me. I may never know how to accurately describe this film, but because we're friends, I'll take a stab at a plot synopsis: Mourning the death of his sister at the hands of a white Mongol who's as much a fan of Bob & Doug McKenzie as he is of killing ladies, Simon (played by Simon Rhee) and his red sweatshirt (raglan cut, tucked into the pants) are summoned to an office building populated by screwfaced martial arts students and new wave security guards, where he's given a gift shop medallion and a very esoteric set of instructions by his elderly, estranged tae kwon do teacher (Simon Rhee's younger brother Phillip). Seeking retribution, he soon finds himself beating the will to live out of dudes in exotic locales such as the middle of a field, the top of a cliff and a restaurant with a floor show that features a man spinning swords within five feet of a baby's face to a sparse audience of old ladies messily eating baked chicken. Occasionally aided by Hawaiian shirt aficionados with butt-cuts, a troop of scrappy karate kids and a gossipy Buddha statue, Simon eventually gets his revenge on his sister's murderer, but to defeat the true source of ultimate evil, he's gonna have to get FUURRRIIIOOUS! Or something like that.
Easy spirit
If it wasn't clear enough already, this is not your standard martial arts revenge flick, something that's immediately signified by the closeups of flubbed sleight-of-hand card tricks in the opening credits, accompanied by the exasperated sighs of the performer. So is it a farce? We've got death incurred by a butt-ful of throwing stars, an Eastern European sorcerer who shoots chickens out of his fingers and a Devo-esque synth trio breaking up band practice to go join a fight, but as to whether or not this is intentional comedy or just willful weirdness, the movie's keeping its mouth zipped shut. Dialogue is kept to a bare minimum throughout, with the first spoken line ("All riiiight!") arriving at the twelve-and-a-half minute mark. In fact, only two characters in the film have significant speaking parts; neither are Simon Rhee, but one is a dying pig. Fight sequences are underscored by too-quiet background music seemingly lifted from Republic Pictures serials with sound effects provided by firecrackers and drum machines and are directed with such laconic detachment that they almost don't qualify as action scenes.
Whitey Cleanshoes and the Milktones
I can't remember when I've been so stymied by a film, and, in keeping in tradition with everything else I don't understand about Furious, I really liked it, even though I couldn't begin to tell you why. That said, I'm still not sure if it was a real film or a particularly screwy feature-length sizzle reel for Simon Rhee's kickfighting prowess. It's also entirely possible that I just dreamed the whole thing. I hope so. Maybe if I go back to sleep right now, there'll be a sequel.
I slid the tape out of the cover to check the condition and was immediately overcome with disappointment. Instead of finding "bloody horror at its best," as the back of the box had promised, I was staring down a stray copy of Pound Puppies and the Legend of Big Paw. Shenanigans! Boyle's Joyland had bamboozled me! I checked the rest of the tapes, hoping that Death Nurse would turn up safely inside a different cover instead of being lost out in the world somewhere, naked and alone. No luck. Not even the mighty internet would prove to be of much use in locating a physical copy in the years to come. I had all but given up on Death Nurse and I ever crossing paths again when, in 2012, Slasher Video teamed up with writer/director Nick Millard and gave me the long-overdue opportunity to check into the Shady Palms Clinic.
Eat-Em-Ups
Gordon and Edith Mortley are the brother-and-sister medical team that run Shady Palms, which is less a medical facility than it is the house they live in. Doctor Gordon wears swishy, ill-fitting slacks, eats chocolate ice cream by playing "one for you, one for me" between the bowl and his mouth, and frankly, he's a wimp, likely the result of a childhood of untold psychological tortures at the hands of big sister Edith. Edith -- the angel of mercilessness of the title and cover image -- is large and intense, keeps piranha rats in the garage (two of which are shown), and punctuates her sentences with a granite-eyed stare that not only commands the camera to repeatedly zoom in on it, but also has the power to quell the interminate cough of a tuberculosis patient.
Stare-Em-Downs
The Mortleys use the clinic as a means for fleecing Medicare out of cash for their patients, though it's unlikely that they've ever been medically certified and, therefore, equally unlikely that a patient will survive even a single day in their care. If Edith isn't asphyxiating them with pillows or feeding them rats, Gordon's inserting dog hearts and mismatched sets of steak knives inside them. On their time off, Edith takes nightmare-filled naps on the couch and Gordon trades a recovering alcoholic booze for sex. Their only problem is a meddling social worker who likes to check up from time to time on the people she's escorted to Shady Palms. The Mortley solution? Dig 'em up, spray off the dirt with a garden hose in broad daylight and pull a junior Weekend At Bernie's on her. However, entry-level corpse puppeteering can only work for so long until somebody gets suspicious, and if there's one thing Edith and her butcher knife don't cater to, it's a nosy old bitch (her words, not mine).
Kill-Em-Offs
People exhibit only mild discomfort while being dismembered. A cat appears from nowhere to make off with a heart during a transplant. Shots are repeated multiple times and often linger to the point of awkwardness. Stilted dialogue and tape rolls abound, and to top it off, it appears to have been shot and edited on consumer-grade video equipment. It's unquestionably a gutter film, but a sincere one, and the same fantastically inept things that make it charming to trash-film votarients will no doubt serve as subjects of ridicule to the "so-bad-it's-hilarious" crowd. If you're the latter, just stick to the film and go no further, but for those wishing to fully appreciate Death Nurse on its own terms, the 25th Anniversary DVD is more than accommodating.
Hose-Em-Offs
In addition to a full-length commentary track (where the genial Millard is joined by his wife Irmi and moderator Jesus Terán of Slasher Video), there's a Q&A with Millard about the film, a photo gallery, a newly-produced outtake entitled "Shady Palms Waiting Room" (with Nick and Irmi reprising their roles as clinic patients), a particularly damning on-camera review from VHSCollector.com's Paul Zamarelli (who considers this the worst film of all time), and longtime Millard collaborator and Death Nurse star Priscilla Alden receives a 14-minute tribute featurette which includes scenes from several of her collaborations with Millard, including Funeral Parlor (the last Millard/Alden film completed before her death from diabetic complications in 2007) and some particularly interesting promo footage from Mad Midnite Movies, a proposed television series that would've featured Alden as a horror film host in the character of Nurse Edith Mortley.
Sit-Em-Downs
Nick Millard stated that if he had a million dollars to make one movie, he'd just make lots of small movies, as cheaply as he could. It's comforting to know that even with a suitcase full of cash, Death Nurse would've turned out the same way -- a languid but astonishing hour of home-movie horror at its most cost-effective and unpretentious. Thank goodness. Had I known nine years ago that I'd be in for an introduction like the one this DVD release provided, the wait would've been a lot less difficult.
