Released without a warning label, HEAD NURSE is not merely incompetent porn, but aggressively annoying. Making it to the end of its hour of out-takes, bloopers and random footage mindlessly strung together is a chore.
Harry Reems, overdoing a fake German accent and not getting any intended laughs, stars as the head Dr. Millstein, abusing new nurses. Andrea True, truly looking unattractive early in her career (she looks far better in stag loops by comparison) gets in on the action, as a lesbian nurse also abusing young nurses. Final member of the star power triad is Marc Stevens, bug-eyed and idiotic as usual, running a lab.
DVD distributor apparently thought these star names were enough to justify a video release. Reems is associated with sex comedy, from DEEP THROAT to MEATBALL, but this so-called movie is not comedy, it is merely a number of failed burlesque sketches, crudely enacted. One sequence that has nothing at all to do with the film (wo young people making love on a cheap set of drapes and cushions) is even tossed in randomly.
My patience reached the breaking point in the second half hour when an unidentified girl with large natural breasts named "Carol" is featured in three separate sex scenes, cross-cut together in violation of any editing rule. Though most 21st Century gonzo porn is issued with minimal editing in "real- time" format, cross-cutting is a traditional strategy to introduce variety and cut down on boredom in a porn feature, but unless one is assembling a bootleg video "The Best of Carol" this switching back and forth from one of her XXX scenes to others is ridiculous.
Beyond the Theatre of the Ridiculous is Stevens' antics, trumpeted as memorable by the distributor but no way near the intended shock effect. He humps the eye socket of a skull in his lab, and shows a nurse how organs are preserved for transplant by humping a female corpse - but the corpse starts thrashing around and grabbing him with her arms to nullify any imaginary necrophilia content.
Perhaps the most annoying gimmicks are idiotic sound effects dubbed in, a terrible banjo music score (featuring "God Bless America", "Yankee Doodle Dandy", "Camptown Races" and the like) and several very, very fake cum shots (a hidden tube spurting some white liquid) thrown in. The frequent inclusion of clapper-boards, repeat shots and bloopers adds to the mess which goes nowhere and ends abruptly after a few "highlights".
A long gestation periods of companies like Troma and various other opinion- makers (the Ed Wood cult) selling fans on the notion that "bad is good" have led to the supposed market for landfill-worthy junk like this -and I can't wait for the pendulum to swing and this trend to be reversed.