Single White Female In a Hospital. Blech.
Main Cast: Paz de la Huerta and Katrina Bowden
Director: Douglas Aarniokoski
Well, that was time poorly spent!
When I saw the trailer and poster for the 2014 movie Nurse 3D, a naked and blood-drenched Paz de la Huerta (The Tripper), I thought this movie might be for me. It looked like a gore-soaked murder romp with a less than sane main character. And let’s face it, de la Huerta always looks a little bit left of the middle anyway.
Unfortunately, what I didn’t know going into the movie was that it’s actually more a retelling of the familiar Single White Female storyline, this time with a nurse as the main character, coupled with what surely was supposed to be a narration reminiscent of Christian Bale’s excellent American Psycho work, but just came across as an unnecessary bore.
De la Huerta stars as Abby Russell, with Katrina Bowden (Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil) as her protégé, Danni. Danni’s got a dirt bag stepfather (played by Martin Donovan, and you can already tell the very second he appears on screen that his character is lowdown), a boyfriend who wants the commitment-phobic Danni to move with him, and a boss–played by Judd Nelson–who takes great pleasure in verbally assaulting the new nurses.
All Abby wants is for Danni to love her the way Abby loves Danni. All Danni wants is to be a good nurse and not have to deal with the bevy of lunatics in her life.
Oh, and Abby has a side-gig trolling bars and clubs at night, luring married men into the shadows, and killing them.
Soon Danni starts to get hip to the fact that Abby isn’t Abby but is really Sarah Price, and that Abby Russell was Sarah Price’s nurse at the mental institution where she’d been committed years earlier. It takes a few more dead bodies for this to sink in, but eventually it does.
Danni tries to escape the web Abby has weaved around her, but finds it increasingly impossible after Abby tells the police Danni is stalking her after Abby refused to return Danni’s advances.
Yeah, Single White Female all over, crazy girl goes crazy when pretty girl won’t let the parasite attach itself to her.
Yawn.
Written by David Loughery (Dreamscape and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier) and director Douglas Aarniokoski (Highlander: Endgame), the movie is visually interesting and stylistic, but void of any real substance. De la Huerta plays the sociopath well enough, but in this case I think she was actually trying to act the part and ended up overdoing it.
I’m sure a good deal of the tension here was supposed to result from the plot, but the plot was just so played out and predictable, it actually sucked out a lot of the tension I was hoping for.
In the end, I was left not with the “out there” gonzo gorefest I had been hoping for and instead got another in a long line of same old same old movies of this particular subgenre. Hell, take out some of the nudity and language, and this could have been any number of anonymous Lifetime movies. And nobody wants that.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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