Delayed Reaction: Nurse 3-D

Premise: A nurse...kills people.

 

I'm willing to entertain that this movie is intentionally campy and mindless. I think no one involved was under the impression that they were making a serious horror movie. That mindset for a movie doesn't appeal to me that much. I'm not a "body count" kind of horror fan...

 

...Actually, no. I'm not going to hedge with this movie. It is terrible. All of it. Paz de la Heurta is a zombie throughout. Apparently, they overdubbed all her lines with another actress which...I don't even know what to say. That narration is so bad as is and that means one or two things. 1) Paz de la Heurta's original narration and performance were even worse. 2) Someone went out of their way thinking this narration was good enough. Either way, it's embarrassing.

 

I guess she got naked though and Katrina Bowden had a couple shower scenes, so at least the movie snuck in the erotic part of the movie.That's...something.

 

I think there was room for the movie to be clever. As is, it has all the wit of that friend you have who thinks they know how to use sarcasm but actually just says a bunch of inscrutable insults. The movie was filmed in 2011 and sat on shelf until 2014, when it was released as quietly as possible.

 

And here's why using Rotten Tomatoes for horror movies is useless. This movie has a 61%. That's technically fresh. That's higher than my beloved V/H/S. I know I'm higher on V/H/S than nearly anyone, but there is no world where Nurse 3D is a better movie than V/H/S. The reason for this discrepancy? As far as I can tell, most reviewers took the stance "I didn't like Nurse 3-D, but if you are into that kind of thing, it's OK." That's patronizing, lazy, and not at all helpful. Basically, the RT formula, which is just thumbs up or thumbs down, sees a bunch of hedged thumbs up and suddenly a movie has a good enough score that people will accidentally think it's worth watching. Notice how Metacritic, which has its own flaws but does have a more nuanced scale, has Nurse 3D sitting at a much more accurate 23. With no review higher than a 63.

 

I made the mistake of watching a few too many of the bad horror movies from my October list in a row, and, as you can tell, I no longer give a shit about my normal position of remembering that even bad movies represent a lot of time that professional put in and that the fact any movie gets made is a minor miracle. Burn this movie.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend