Nurse - Review

I have sit through several reboot misfires and Christian catastrophes this year but somehow, this extremely forgettable horror-thriller was my most painful watching experience of 2014 so far. I was severely thrashing in my seat and boiling over while partaking in this god awful abomination. Let's get the plot out first before I start my surgery: A working nurse (Paz de la Huerta) spends her evenings slumming through clubs, hoping to be approached by affair-seeking men before then murdering them for their cheating ways. But that plotline is immediately dropped off the roof, along with the first victim, and the story instead focuses on Huerta's obsession with her trainee (Katrina Bowden). Because, you see, FATAL ATTRACTION plus lesbian overtones equals tight pants and male lapdogs. So what's wrong with something that sounds like a normal exploitation movie? Answer #1: Paz de la Huerta. She is cancer, a eye-searing blight on the entire picture. She's supposed to be a total package; Venus incarnate, a master manipulator and an unhinged slasher all in the body of a model. Huerta is certainly none of that, nor can see even do the easy feat of sexily reading off a restaurant menu at one point. She's not an actor, she's an alien creature that needs to be killed by fire; we'll keep the Scarlett Johansson one, thank you. Every time she opens her mouth and monotones out an one-liner, you can hear the restless stirring of a million coffins in Hollywood. No amount of full frontal nudity can cover up her bottom of the barrel talent.


I'm not going overboard with my abject hatred for Huerta just to be a bitter pill but because all of her blatant faults weren't addressed by the filmmakers or fixed in the final cut. For director Doug Aarniokoski and his co-writer David Loughery, who just copied and pasted his script for OBSESSED (including the catfight finale), she is Linda Fiorentino from THE LAST SEDUCTION, but more naked. Which brings us to Answer #2: The story is total bullshit. Huerta gets away with all of her dirty deeds for no explainable reasons. For example, she tells a suspicious co-worker that she got her medical degree at Syracuse; later in a closeup, her profile sheet clearly states "University of Syracuse". Where's the red flags?! How did she make it through the screening process to her position with pathetic lies like that?! This gets even more egregious at the end of the film, where she suddenly becomes the female version of Michael Myers, constantly murdering everyone in front of her with ease and getting up from every major injury, despite having the build and prowess of a baby squirrel. Again, Aarniokoski doesn't care about this anomaly, nor does he care about making a good movie. He's fine that NURSE advocates that women are psycho, stupid hypocrites, who are willing to live with sexual harassment in the workplace and oddly love to take showers in their underwear. His only concern is that his bad 3D visual effects work properly, including the sight of CGI shower water. I would end by saying that you shouldn't resuscitate when this movie loses your patience but that implies that the movie actually had life to begin with. This is a stillborn, through and through.



FINAL REVIEW: 1 / 5