Death Nurse

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.

I've seen some classic shot-on-video movies from the 80's, such as Blood Cult, Dreamaniac, Boardinghouse, GoreMet Zombie Chef From Hell, Cannibal Campout, 555, etc. All these movies in which could have some laughable entertainment value and noticeable effort to make a film on literally a zero budget. But then we have Death Nurse.

This movie, well, why even call this a movie? There was no effort put into making this mess. like the previous reviewer has stated, it seems they had filmed this film and ripped the tape right out of the camcorder and thats exactly how it feels. The editing must've been done on two VCRs, and a good 15 minutes of the film are clips from the Directors previous film, Criminally Insane, keep in mind this movie is only about 55 minutes long, not even a full length movie. Its quite obvious that this film was made to fill the box art it came in.

The only reason to watch this film is for the learning experience on how low cinema could go just to cash in a buck. This is absolutely the lowest your going to find. I once thought that Blood Lake was the worse, well, Death Nurse takes the cake.

Death Nurse (1987)

BOMB (out of 4)

Edith (Priscilla Alden) and her brother Gordon (Albert Eskinazi) work in their house as "doctors" but in reality they're just nuts who welcome in patients so that they can brutally kill them. They welcome in a man and kill him quickly but his annoying "keeper" continues to check in on him, which causes a problem for the doctors.

Director Nick Millard and star Alden hit exploitation gold with CRIMINALLY INSANE. That ultra low-budget movie just had something about it that appealed to drive-in fans such as myself but he followed that up in 1987 with a horrid sequel. That sequel was about forty minutes worth of footage from the original movie and twenty minutes worth of new scenes. DEATH NURSE is considered the unofficial third film in the series since it does feature the same director, star and sets but I think it plays out better as its own film. The problem is that it features a lot of stock footage from CRIMINALLY INSANE.

You know, I admire people who go out there and make movies no matter of their quality. I review movies as a passion but even the worst movie ever made deserves more "credit" than someone like me who simply watches them and talks about them. DEATH NURSE is a really awful movie on so many levels but I guess this should be expected. The special effects are bad. The music and cinematography are bad. The editing is bad. Everything is pretty bad here and what's worse is the fact that so much stock footage is used.

The good old days of VHS stores had countless movies like this on the store shelves. I actually found CRIMINALLY INSANE to be entertaining but this film here is just really, really bad.

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.

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.