I previously reviewed Nurse Sherri on my old site back in 2008. Of all the Al Adamson movies I’ve watched in the past two months, this and Blood of Ghastly Horror are the only two where I’ve felt compelled to increase my Star Rating. I found myself enjoying this one enough to bump it up from ** to ** ½. Who knows? Maybe if I watch it in another twelve years I’ll go ahead and give it ***. Here’s my brand-new review of the flick, followed by the old one:
The mixing of two totally different genres is a staple of Al Adamson’s work. This one is a cross between a softcore Nurse nudie and possession horror, both of which were big in the mid-‘70s. It often seems like two movies slapped together (which unlike most of Adamson’s films, this was an original work, and not another cut-and-paste-feature). Despite the narrative whiplash involved, it winds up being kind of fun.
Part of the amusement comes from seeing Adamson’s stock company appearing yet again. Geoffrey Land plays the smug lothario doctor, Bill Roy plays a cult leader in his second Adamson movie in a row, and Marilyn Joi plays one of the sexy nurses. The movie really belongs to Jill Jacobson though who plays the sexiest possessed nurse the ‘70s ever saw.
When a cult leader (Roy) dies on the operating table, his spirit possesses a nurse named Sherri (Jacobson) who happens to be in the operating room. What follows feels like a mess of movies put into a blender. We have horny nurses, cult leaders performing rituals, melodrama involving a blind football player (who naturally develops extrasensory gifts to discover something supernatural is afoot) finding love, a possessed woman talking like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, a revenge from beyond the grave subplot, and Scooby-Doo scenes of fraidy cat nurses sneaking into a graveyard after dark. It has it all.
I think I appreciated the sexploitation stuff more this time around. There’s a random scene where Land and Jacobson flash back to their first times (he gets a blowjob while giving a presentation in class, while she has a poolside lesbian tryst). There’s also a part where a nurse bangs a nervous patient who’s about to go in for surgery that feels like something out of a bedroom farce. Even though these scenes are completely unnecessary, they add to the overall goofy charm of the movie.
This
isn’t the first time I had to reassess the rating of one of Adamson’s movies as
I have combed my way through this boxset.
Blood of Ghastly Horror improved an entire One Star. I can’t be that generous with this one as
it’s still as patchy as ever. However,
seeing the film within the context of Adamson’s other work, I can’t help but to
give this an additional Half-Star at the very least. It’s borderline schizophrenic, but it’s nutty
as hell and it certainly isn’t boring.
That alone is worth an extra Half-Star in my book.
ARCHIVE REVIEW: NURSE SHERRI (1978) ** (ORIGINALLY POSTED: FEBRUARY, 5TH, 2008)
A religious cult leader gets stabbed to death by a bunch of greedy doctors on the operating table. His soul takes the form of lemon and lime colored negative scratches that possess a cute nurse named Sherri (Jill Jacobson) while she sleeps. In no time at all, Sherri starts talking in the cult leader’s voice and begins murdering the doctors responsible for his death. First guy gets a pitchfork rammed through his back and out his stomach. Next guy takes a trip to Screwdriver City. Third guy falls into a pit of molten steel. Then Sherri has a meat cleaver meltdown on the last guy. In the end, Sherri’s candy striping co-workers help break the spirit’s evil spell by turning the cult leader’s gravesite into an open B-B-Q pit.
I guess this was an interesting albeit awkward attempt to blend the low rent thrills of your basic Exorcist rip-off with the titillation of Roger Corman’s sexy “Nurse” movies. It doesn’t quite work, but then again, I’m a sucker for any movie in which nurses showcase their bedside manner by getting it on with their patients.
The flick was directed by Al Adamson, and like any Adamson movie, there’s going to more than its share of filler. There’s a car chase that serves no purpose whatsoever and whole sections of the film don’t make a heck of a lot of sense. Like the scene where the spirit of the cult leader appears on a victim’s dashboard and forces him to drive off a cliff. I mean hello, I thought the “spirit” was supposedly in Sherri’s body, so what the heck is it doing in the guy’s car? (I will refrain from making an obvious “repossessing the car” joke.) This scene also features a hilarious continuity error as the car goes over a cliff in the daytime, but it blows up at the bottom of the canyon at night.
Like most of Adamson’s oeuvre, Nurse Sherri is sloppy, disjointed, and erratically paced, but that doesn’t necessarily make it unwatchable. The film’s chief asset (besides a few hints of T & A) is a fine performance by Jacobson. She’s pretty good, but for a movie called Nurse Sherri, she’s not in it as much as you’d think. Jacobson doesn’t get an opportunity to really strut her stuff because there are way too many extraneous characters and subplots (like the blind football player who falls in love with a black nurse) that get in the way.
The flick is chockfull of bad dialogue, which adds to the fun. Some of my favorites include “Your powers are finite. Mine are limitless!”, “I’ll introduce you to the bliss that lies on the border to Hell!”, and “One ingrown toenail and it’s the big casino!”
AKA: Beyond the Living. AKA: Black Voodoo. AKA: Hands of Death. AKA: Hospital of Terror. AKA: Killer’s Curse. AKA: Terror Hospital. AKA: The Possession of Nurse Sherri.
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