Maniac Nurses (1992)

This is How Movies Should Be Made

Fantastic!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Maniac Nurses, or Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy, isn't the worst movie ever, despite what other reviewers have said. I've seen the worst movie ever and this isn't even close.Instead, it's an incoherent mess of a plot featuring scantily clad nurses killing people for no apparent reason. Note that the nurses are generally dressed in skimpy costumes, there isn't enough nudity in the film to catapult it to genuine sleaze status. There isn't enough campy kitsch to make it into a so-bad-it's-good movie. There isn't enough bad humor to make it into any kind of comedy, and there isn't enough of anything else to make it very watchable.It's not awful; it's just plain bad, with the only redeeming quality at all being the skimpy costumes. They've maximized on that with the title and the box cover, but it's just not enough.

So this movie is one of my favorites, along with City Lights, Vertigo, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly. It's a perverse amalgam of a rumored Hungarian porn film, set up by Troma to act as an inane and confusing trifle regarding nurses in a random clinic finding random people on random abandoned roads and then randomly torturing them. Of course the acting is non-existent; the movie has no real linear direction; the music is from a low budget box; the dialogue insane and murky.Yet through the narrator's non-stop ramblings, the viewer can find a sense of amusement resulting from what they experience. Troma didn't alter this in order to add it to their own library as a mounted and highlighting piece. Rather, the studio took Woody Allen's "What's New Tiger Lily?" and played around with the concept, experimenting the same way teenagers would after receiving editing and dubbing equipment.The aforementioned narrator tries to connect and explain what we see on screen. The problem is, he's watching a different movie. He claims these nurses are sick and twisted, beyond reproach. But in that dour sense, he's wrong. Nurses, /people/, who reach this level of absurdity are going to be kept in an abandoned, desolate "clinic". They're not sick, twisted white trash. They're hyperbolic heroines who are stuck with a bad plot.For whatever reason, the gardener sees the nurses as bizarre, yet works at the clinic in the middle of nowhere. The true purpose of the gardener in the movie is beyond the scope of this exploratory exercise. Overall he isn't a non-sequitor. His role isn't as philosophical as the Plate O'Shrimp from Repo Man, but it isn't just a reason to cut to randomness. The gardener doesn't provide a moral view, he's in this just as much as the nurses. At least the narrator is an intentional ruse who tries to solemnly explain to the viewer what isn't explained on screen.As for the post-editing touches such as the swirl, the flashing names, and the score card, Troma includes this only to further push the outlandishness of the movie. Afterall, Sabrina stands in her room with a gun and shoots in a 180 arc, making soft gun noises. The movie was already mind-boggling. As with Terror Firmer: if you're going to try something, why not go all out?The point is: there is no point. It's a nihilistic take on film, not on "sex-u-ality". Troma steps up to the plate, looks at the critics who say their feature films have no substance, and then swings for the fences with this movie. But it turns out to be a foul ball on a full count. It accounts for nothing in the long run while managing to anabolically load Troma's other films by allowing them to say "Hey, at least it isn't Maniac Nurses" See this movie. You'll have to get it through an online rental place. Watch it with at least two other people. Only then will you realize that it's a joke by Troma. It's an attempt to show that we all live in a meta-narrative, and the post-modern approach of satirizing film with film exemplifies the point of no return which our modern collective has reached.

The first sign that there is a genius at work in the making of this motion picture is the long (some might say far too long, but I'll not hear of it) sequence where the narrator explains why the Maniac Nurses, even though they came from white trash origins, were even worse than everyday run of the mill white trash because they had lost their enthusiasm for life's pleasures. This narration plays over footage of the nurses shooting up and half-heartedly watching another nurse performing a rather lethargic striptease for their benefit. Although I can't prove it conclusively, I believe the footage of the striptease is looped and just plays the same sequence of moves over and over again. The looped footage and the over the top pseudo-sociological narration are perhaps the greatest synthesis of sound and image ever perfected in the art of film-making.Also there is the baby born with an Elvis tattoo. Its not a birthmark, its a tattoo. And he didn't have it tattooed onto his skin, he was born with it. Once you get past your initial resistance you can see the genius inherent in this plot point.And if I remember right the first baby born with an Elvis tattoo died inexplicably, but then another one was born with an Elvis tattoo as well. Fortunately the second baby born with an Elvis tattoo managed to live long enough to have some impact on the movie's plot.Even if I did the best acid in the world for three weeks straight, I never would come up with this stuff in a million years.Other than those flashes of genius, this is a real stink-bomb. Not even a good T&A exploitation or gruesome violence exploitation flick. Just some cheap footage shot by neophytes that Troma studios bought for a song and then probably threw a few hours and a few hundred bucks into adding narration too. (Just a guess on my part, this is not the kind of film to inspire exhaustive research.)

People familiar with the Troma-repertoire know they should never except masterpieces (or even "good" films), yet this piece of junk is worse than all their other incompetent productions put together! "Maniac Nurses (find ecstasy)" is an unendurably sick fantasy that obviously sprung from the perverted mind of some untalented weirdoes and Troma decided to distribute it as a horror/exploitation film. The initial ineptness-chuckles this movie cause quickly turn into tedious obstacles and, eventually, you have to struggle very hard in order not to throw the DVD far out the window. The...um... 'story' revolves on a group of deranged women who entrench themselves in some sort of heavily guarded private-hospital (God knows why). They fill their days by whipping each other, walk around in sexy lingerie and – occasionally – they play sleazy variants of the "most dangerous game" with unfortunate campers. The things that went horribly wrong in this production are too numerous to mention, and I guarantee that you'll never ever come across a movie more retarded than this one.MST3K-fans would orgasm over watching this flick: the narration is hilarious (seriously, what the hell is this guy talking about all the time?), the editing is a joke and the dialogues sound like they were written by an army of illiterate monkeys. The only aspect mildly admirable about it is that the creators obviously knew their sleaze-classics. The über-nurses are named Ilsa and Greta (after the infamous 70's exploitation franchise) and there sometimes are (unintentional?) references towards classic WIP-movies. "Maniac Nurses" also contains loads of graphic gore and tons of blood and I'm sure that, if it would have been filmed more professionally, it could had become one of the grossest and most offensive films ever. Instead of this, it only looks ludicrous and pathetic. It has to be said, though: the girls all have pretty faces and ravishing bodies. They probably all secretly hoped that this production would be their spring-board to ultimate Hollywood success. Awfully sorry girls...you're not even talented enough to make it in the porn business.However, one element of "Maniac Nurses" is downright brilliant and I can't resist mentioning it (spoiler): at a certain point in the film, they refer to a child supposedly born with an Elvis-tattoo on its little chest! Priceless!!