Nurses for Sale

Sam Sherman and Al Adamson were notorious for their tinkering, seemingly unable to release any film Sherman acquired in its original form. Well at the bottom of even this low-grade barrel has to be NURSES FOR SALE, an absolutely massacred version of the German production CAPTAIN ROUGHNECK FROM ST. PAULI, with a few extra nude scenes added by Adamson.

Plot in this truncated cut is nigh-incomprehensible, with German actor Curd Jurgens starring as Captain Jolly, hired to transport a shipment of vaccine to South America disguised inside a liquor delivery. When corrupt officials attempt to confiscate his booze to sell on the black market, Jolly has the crew destroy it, landing himself in the clink and his more precious cargo stolen. Somehow this all relates to a group of brigands hiding in the jungle, who have kidnapped a quintet of female nurses and their male companions and are holding them for ransom.

All this is only sort of retroactively comprehensible after reading a synopsis (ideally of the original version) as Sherman for some reason saw fit to remove almost a third of the feature, rendering the narrative inscrutable. Thankfully, he left in a very stupid comedic scene where Jolly and his companion have to escape a bar in drag, as well as shoehorned in some extra T&A from Adamson that pads the film out to a still-barely-feature-length 67 minutes. Based on what's visible here, the original CAPTAIN ROUGHNECK doesn't appear to have been any great shakes - a dumb, T&A-laced adventure flick meant to briefly entertain the masses - but it certainly deserves better than this. Almost anything does!