4/10
it's not the best example of Nurse movies, but it's certainly one to start with for a reason
18 July 2017
This is my first "Nurses" movie, an unofficial series (without canon I mean, you can watch them any which way you want I suppose) from Roger Corman's New World Pictures, which started as... well, I'm sure there was some sort of idea from George Armitage and Corman originally, but how it got to Candy Stripe Nurses is mostly due, I'd assume, to economics: these movies made money, as far as they went, and this was one of the later ones. In a way I'm glad I started with this one since I'm sure that it can only go up from here, hopefully anyway, as far as the quality of the writing and acting.

Of course, one would argue, I shouldn't expect much quality when it comes to that stuff. This is about young, teenaged-to-20-something aged women in uniforms getting into shenanigans, usually involving their breasts coming out of their outfits.

There is some mild attention here to plot, actually three of them, almost with the kind of looseness I'd associate, of all things, with something like Car Wash (that might be due to the LA mid 70's shaggy period flavor): one girl, the Latina one, is brought on as a nurse as a way of curtailing possible juvenile dilenquency, and becomes involved with trying to hunt down the actual culprit of a convenience store robbery as the man who was shot and caught is in the hospital; another woman is (maybe?) attracted to a rock star who has, so to speak, lost his mojo; one last girl (who probably is the "better" actress of the bunch) hooks up with a college jock and helps him with his homework, despite the fact that she's still in high school.

Again, it's all soft stuff, and that's fine, but I can't help but try and, you know, pay attention to things when I watch a film like, say, repetitive music or lazy/tired shot compositions, or that there is some acting (Maria Rojo as nurse Marisa Valdez) that would've needed work in a high school production. There's some fun to be had with the story involving the haggard/mojo-less rock star, since that actor seems to get what the context of everything is, and at first some of the music was alright. The rest of the time it felt like a movie that is, even as the first "nurse" movie I've watched, going through the motions of its plot almost exactly as you'd expect... well, maybe not entirely: there IS the part where the basketball jock is somehow allowed behind the wheel to go tearassing around town drunk at night with other nurses in the car with him because... well, the movie needs a climax, don't it?

There's also the requisite number of breasts - some quite nice, actually - and, here and there, rapey vibes that perhaps can't be helped given the kind of sleaze we're accepting. I'm not sure what potential there was for this, but I think one legitimate criticism, past going after the performances or (for the most part) the filmmamking in general, is that we don't really get to see much of the girls even *in* the hospital as the nurses doing their work; that might be fine for others, but it seemed odd to have a movie with this title and about 10 minutes of it is spent with the girls actually seeing them do what they do (including, here and there, getting it on with other doctors/patients/etc).

Point is, it seems like once I double back to Armitage and Jonathan Kaplan's films, I should likely expect... well, MORE of whatever it is.
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