Night Call Nurses

Jonathan Kaplan – 1971 – USA

Probably one of the sloppiest of the handful of naughty-young-professional-women series by Roger Corman’s company in the early 70s, Jonathan Kaplan’s Night Call Nurses is still pretty interesting as a time-capsule of its era.  It would be easy enough to make a trashy soft-core sexploitation film, but to his credit Corman put a high premium on humor and topicality, which gives his productions an eccentric quality that earns forgiveness, even affection, for their overall silliness and weak production values.  In most such films, either stewardesses or nurses or cheerleaders struggle – or don’t struggle – with nymphomania, political stridency and general empty-headedness, but in the Corman films, the young women are fairly normal and are merely reacting to a string of bizarre events.  In this case, one nurse gets involved with a notorious black revolutionary in hospital after being injured in a prison riot, while another becomes the focus of a creepy psychologist’s experimental therapies.  Meanwhile, the nurses are also being sent increasingly menacing notes written in lipstick that threaten to punish them for their presumed promiscuity.  With a climax that involves a run from the law and an insane transvestite, it’s hard not to smile along with the film’s madcap pace and strange goings-on.