Once upon a while I stumbles over a film that I never heard of, but who seems so twisted and fun that I just have to see it. Sick Nurses is a sick little movie from Thailand, but a sick movie with a lot of humour and tounge in cheek. It's part a parody/satire over the typical Asian long-haired ghosts, and also a very black comedy about how seven superficial nurses get what they deserve!The hospitals favorite doctor is young, handsome and fucks all the nurses. He's also the leading bodysnatcher in the area, together with his nurses. He steals bodies from the hospital and sells in the black market. But with so many beautiful and egocentrical nurses around, there must be intrigue and fights - and when everyone think one of the nurses is gonna marry him, the other ones kill her and together with him they sell the body. Well, try to anyway. After having the body in his trunk for seven days, he's tired of it.... and so are the vengeful spirit of the dead nurse, who decides to take out her gruesome revenge in one bloody, dark night...
Yes, this movie is about a long-haired female ghost killing people. BUT... it's also a very clever and funny satire where the filmmakers toy with the clichés, twist them around a little bit and makes something that's more of a very black comedy than a pure horror movie. Sure, of course there's plenty of horror elements, but they are often so weird that they become more bizarre than scary. For exampel, one character gets her jaw ripped of and suffocated with a fetus! Another one kills one hundred faceless nurse-ghosts by stabbing them with a pregnancy test. Another one get's stuck in her handbag in a very special way. The ghost is painted black with slightly blonde hair and uses her power to make the characters to do outrageous stuff.
The style of the movie is also very cool. It reminds me more of John Waters, Wisit Sasanatieng and some people with less imagination would say the whole movie is a visual tribute to Mario Bava, and to a degree, even Dario Argento. There's splashes of strong colors everywhere, often red or green, the angles are stylish and there's a European feeling to some of the set-ups: static camera, and a lot of weird stuff is going on at the edge of the framing. Gore? Yes, but not THAT much. The first hour is virtually goreless, but with a lot of bizarre scenes, and then we're treated some delicious splatter-scenes with a lot of blood-spurting and some original digital and physical effects.
I think the movie is quite low budget, but the crew has done a great job making it look fantastic. The humour is fun, and sometimes very subtle with a lot of attention to details. The characters might me shallow, but that's part of the concept in the movie. Everything is about looks, fortune, power and sex. My favorite character is the nurse who tries to loose weight all the time by vomiting, and later she brushes her teeth and eating a suger-donut at the same time!
Fun, fun, fun. This is a small but almost brilliant black comedy, which will make many disappointed by distributors who tries to make it look like a grim and serious J-horror movie. Pearls before swine, to be honest.
