There is bad filmmaking, and then there is awful filmmaking, and then there is Death Nurse. On the one hand, it is a terrible little movie that is amateurish at every step. The direction, the story, the acting and everything else from top to bottom. Yet, on the other hand, because it is so bad, it holds a certain kind of charm that makes it almost impossible to stop watching. Strange, but true.

Directed by Nick Millard, who also wrote and starred in it, the movie is shot in one setting with a handycam to chronicle it all, and it looks exactly as you might expect. There is no budget here, as everyone in the picture looks like they either live there or are the neighbours who have been roped into appearing in this movie. It is not a bad thing to keep costs down, if one is being truthful, and somehow, despite the very poor outcome, there is a little something that keeps its audience watching when, by rights, most people would have turned it off in the first five minutes.

The story consists of one Dr. Mortley and his sister, who also happens to be a nurse, running a private clinic outside of their subdivision home. People somehow get referred there, get murdered there and then charge the state so they can bring in a bit of money in order to keep doing what they do. One immediately wonders why nobody has ever come knocking, looking for the patients and wondering where they have gone. Suffice it to say, one person does eventually show up asking exactly that and, in turn, gets herself killed off by Nurse Edith, who takes an absolute glee in her work. Sometimes all it takes is a simple mistake to get oneself caught, and Nurse Edith and Dr. Mortley do just that.

The movie is a short one, running just shy of an hour, which is a good thing as making it to that hour mark was hard enough. While it is somewhat interesting despite the lack of nearly anything good, having it run any longer might have turned off those viewers who did stick around. Nurse Edith is a great villain. Priscilla Alden, who portrayed the killer nurse, was off-putting at first, but seeing her get annoyed throughout the movie made her slightly more human. The special effects were laughable, but seeing Alden try to take it seriously made it bearable, and that is where some of that aforementioned charm would come in.

Looking back on this movie, the only thing that Death Nurse really had going for it was wondering what would happen to Nurse Edith. Millard leaves it all on a cliffhanger, whether to keep people wondering or to make way for the eventual Death Nurse 2, which would be released one year later.

1 out of 5