Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy (1990) - aka Bloodsucking Freaks 2

Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy
Rating – One Skull
Copyright 1990 Troma Entertainment (‘entertainment’ in the loosest possible term..)
Rated 18 (UK) Unrated (USA)

The Characters:-
Sabrina – The object of Ilsa’s affections. And also her daughter, urgh.
Ilsa – The commandant of the… hospital? Facility? Whatever you call this damn place.
Greta – Second in command and former object of Ilsa’s affections. Since being spurned in favour of Sabrina, she keeps herself instead occupied with Ushi and Gretchen. Personally, I didn’t think that was such a bad deal… Killed by Sabrina.
Betty, Ivy, Ushi and Gretchen – Minions. Killed by either Ilsa or Sabrina.
Car Driver – Nurse Fodder
Driver’s Wife/Chained girl – Nurse Fodder. This part was essentially the same, but played by two different actresses, according to IMDB and the credits. Go figure.
Gardener – He is brilliant. He spends his short time in the film giving play-by-play commentary on the nurse’s activities, usually in a pithy one word statement. ‘Maniacs!’ ‘Sick!’ Shot by Sabrina and impaled on a gnome. That was not a typo.
Garbage Man – He lives in the woods and cleans up the dead for the nurses. Killed by Sabrina
Monk – He is found wandering the road, whipping himself. Greta kidnaps him and saves him the trouble. Shot by Sabrina.
Happy Campers! – All killed. And good riddance.
Baby – Ilsa’s, and born with an Elvis tattoo. Why? Who cares…
The Narrator – FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SHUT UP.

The Plot:-
Do you remember, gentlemen (and ladies, perhaps), when you were younger and you watched your first hardcore porn film? Do you remember looking down at that blank VHS in wonder? Did you sit down, old chap in hand, and fast forward past all the talking until the first items of clothing were being flung around like a tornado? Of course you do. It was the same for everyone.

Imagine, then, your sweaty-handed eighteen year old self deciding one day to play with the form book a little. Today, you are going to fast forward past all the hardcore sex and just concentrate on the bad acting in-between. Now, imagine an entire film like that. What sort of monstrosity in cinema would dare to pollute the celluloid world in such a foul manner...?

Just so you know, I had to watch this three times. THREE TIMES, just to bring this review to you as a warning. I also consumed a bottle of bourbon during the course of these viewings. I recommend anyone foolhardy to reach for this on the video shelf should make a similar investment.

So the film begins with a narrator inviting us into this depraved world, where so-called doctors and nurses diagnose and prescribe sex and violence. I’m optimistic, naïve and absolutely with you so far. A clinic where women dress up as sexy nurses and butcher people for their own gratification? I can dig that, even if some of the women are dressed as Nazis. Why are they dressed as Nazis? I have no idea. As if capturing and killing people isn’t evil enough, they have to dress in Third Reich fashion, just in case they accidentally gain sympathy.

Yes, your honour. I did help her dispose of the body. She had such lovely eyes. But then I spotted her jackboots in the bottom of the wardrobe and I decided enough was enough…

Sabrina is tossing and turning in her bed, troubled by something (other than her top unbuttoning itself). Ilsa bursts in and offers to help Sabrina. The medication required involves death and violence! Quelle surprise. Telling an orderly to get the ambulance, Ilsa, and a harem of stocking-clad nymphs set up a road block to wave down some passers by, hiding one of the nurses (with a shotgun) under a sheet on a stretcher. Sabrina watches on. You have to hand it to the guy who dutifully stops in his truck. The suspicion etched on his face was perfect. I mean, how many times have you been driving down a road and been stopped by a female ambulance crew, dressed in lingerie, asking YOU for help in a medical emergency. It’d be like a group of sexy, naked policewomen all handcuffed to their squad cars begging for assistance in the apprehension of a shoplifter. Or a team of curvaceous female fire-fighters covered in foam from a broken extinguisher standing helplessly around a small bonfire…

*claps hands* Oy! Concentrate on the review, dammit!

Anyway, suspicion is a good thing but it is no substitute for mental uptake. Before his brain can process the strange events in front of him, he has his head blown apart. His partner in the truck is kidnapped by the nurses and taken in for a pointless whipping in her panties, followed by further torture in what looks like a sauna.

Also, the gardener gives us his two-pennyworth. I loved the gardener as a character, and it’s a shame he doesn’t feature for longer than twenty minutes. ‘Sex crazed sadists!’ ‘Maniacs!’ That’s the sum total of his contribution to dialogue.

Meanwhile, we get to learn more about Sabrina. She is Ilsa’s daughter as well as sex-pet, despite looking nothing alike. Sabrina spends her time lounging around in white lingerie and reading comics that she appears to have drawn herself. As she flicks through them, words leap out at her. War! Uzi! Hitler! All the while, the narrator droning and waffling over the top of some dreadful music. As Sabrina flicks through her comics and pretends to fire her gun, the gardener pops up at the window for a sneaky peek. When I say sneaky, I mean he has his head and shoulders above the parapet and her bed is about two feet away from the window sill. She shoots him through the head and he falls back to be impaled on the garden gnomes he had conveniently set up below his ladder. Again, that is not a typo.

With the gardener ostensibly buried, Sabrina, Ilsa and Greta sit down together for lunch, a cannibalistic feast consisting mainly of… the gardener. As Ilsa holds up a huge piece of meat, Greta comments that it is his tongue. If that is his tongue, I’m amazed he could speak or even breathe. Ilsa is outraged and demands an explanation; that Greta duly gives. I’m not going to repeat what she says, but it is about as subtle as turning up to a stranger’s funeral dressed as a clown; and no less tasteless.

Having said that, you have to hand it to Greta; her self confident logic in linking his cunnilingus skills to her genitalia thereby guaranteeing a nice taste holds no bounds.

Ilsa prepares for surgery. She is going to operate on the woman who we saw being whipped earlier, and turn her into a robotic love doll for her increasingly bored daughter. I have no idea either. After cutting the woman’s throat, the nurses get down to business, painstakingly removing her organs. When I say painstakingly, I mean it. I’ll be honest, I was expecting a torture scene here – the woman to be eviscerated alive. What? Don’t look at me like that. I’m going by the tone of the film. I’m not saying I want to see it? Instead, the girls just busy themselves by fumbling around inside the victim who is quite dead, occasionally commenting on the quality of her organs. This goes on for about five minutes, which is about four minutes, twenty seconds too long. At no point is there any effort to turn her into the aforementioned ‘robotic love doll’, which only makes the scene even more painful.

Actually, I was intrigued how the premise would work, and it briefly awoke me from my alcoholic stupor. I imagined something between Frankenhooker and Tetsuo: The Iron Man - two MUCH BETTER MOVIES.

During this operation, one of the nurses takes exception to all the dirty work they have to do for the benefit of Sabrina and cuts up the body with a chainsaw. The nurse’s punishment is to be released into the woods to be hunted by Sabrina. Unfortunately for Sabrina, a tree beats her to it – the hapless nurse runs into a branch, impaling herself. This isn’t the first time someone will suffer a severe flesh trauma by running into something innocuous.

I wish I was joking.

Back at the clinic, Betty is dancing for the rest of the troupe in her frilly nothings. She looks as bored as I feel. No man should ever be bored during a lap-dance, but this film has that effect on the senses. The narrator drones on about feelings of disinterest leading to death, something which hit me quite hard as I eyed the rapidly emptying bottle of whiskey next to me and wondered how quickly I could slash my wrists. Throughout this film, the narrator takes the lead and explains the plot to us, or sometimes just witters on about the human condition. Is this a commentary on the morality of mankind, as nurses butcher other people and themselves, whilst engaging in sexual activity? If only! I’ll give you a clue: it begins with P and rhymes with ‘fadding’.

Greta plots to end this regime (thank you Greta!), by spelling out Ilsa’s sick perversities to Sabrina. She explains how Ilsa once gave birth to a boy bearing an Elvis tattoo. No, I don’t know why either. Neither do I understand why this would sway a girl like Sabrina, who spends her spare time reading warped comics and blowing away the horticultural staff. What does it have to do with the plot? Nothing! Will the child feature in the plot more prominently? No! Do you care? I doubt it. Greta tries to explain some home truths to Sabrina on a lone walk through the woods, but the Garbage Man bumbles into the scene and scares Sabrina away.

Everytime he appears, I’m reminded of that iconic scene from Silent Night, Deadly Night II. A little bit of a b-movie cross-over there. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I mean. It’s the word ‘garbage’…

We’re only half an hour in at this point. We’ve still got another fifty to go. Egads.

To cut an interminably long story short, the girls continue their manifesto of moral bankruptcy. At one point, Greta kidnaps a passing monk self-flagellating down the road. She clamps him in the irons and decides to give him a hand. If you think watching an attractive girl being whipped in her panties was bad (and it was worse than it sounds), imagine a half naked, bald, fat man being beaten for a good five minutes. At least the camera stays on his face… mostly.

In the films pulse-pounding climax, one of the lookouts spots a group of campers on the hospital grounds. The girls are despatched, armed to the teeth. For some reason the campers fail to spot the Nazi Porntroopers slowly marching down the steep hill towards their tents, but the monotony is broken by the sight of several women clearly in heels trying to walk down a steep incline in long grass. I wanted one of them to fall over, like you would not believe. There are some wobblers to watch out for, and for once in this film I’m not talking about boobies.

The girls set upon the campers who have scattered. Most settle for good old run and gun tactics, although there is a modest amount of pseudo-lesbianism here and there. Don’t get excited, it’s not worth the effort. Greta, being fiendish in her malevolence, decides to set a trap in the ruins of an old building. The psychotic harlot sets up a line of chicken wire at ankle level and waits for one of the morons to run past. You think the intention is to trip the unsuspecting backpacker up don’t you? Wrong! The man stumbles, and I mean stumbles, into the wire at barely a jog and loses both his feet at the ankle. Caught between the stupidity of the scene and the desire to act out the pain of a man who has just amputated his own feet, he decides to sit on his arse and whine like a child who has been told that there is no ice cream for him tonight. Agonizingly, the camera stays on him for rather too long, and returns to him again later! Witness an actor running out of steam whilst his shoes stare back at him still full of foot.

Nearly there now folks. Greta gets back to the hospital and informs Sabrina about Ilsa’s past. When Greta gets bored, the narrator elbows his way into the dialogue. (Nooooo!) Fully clued up on her history, Sabrina slips into her usual lingerie and guns down everyone with a pulse. Turning her back to the camera, she walks away as the credits roll to the sound of a toddler attempting to play Beethoven (I think) on a cheap synthesizer. The End.

And that, my friends, is the conclusion. Even the title of the damn film proves to be wrong. They aren’t nurses (otherwise Ed Gein is a neurosurgeon.) They aren’t especially manic. And they don’t find ecstasy, just death. Except Sabrina, obviously, although she never looks ecstatic, just as bored as the viewer. So no one has gained anything. Not the characters, not me… the only person to win out of the experience was Jack Daniels himself.

*shakes fist* Damn you Daniels, damn you girls and damn me too…

Getting back to the film, the porn analogy at the beginning of the review isn’t just a cheap metaphor; it does have some legs to it. Several of my fellow b-movie loving friends have told me that the film actually started life as a Hungarian porno. This is particularly noticeable in a scene involving the campers, when Ilsa forces one of the guys to have sex with her. Except we only see the initial dialogue and smouldering looks, and then the end as she is buttoning her shirt, but none of the hanky-panky in between. Apparently, a Belgian director called Harry M. Love (if that IS your real name…) obtained the film and edited out all of the hardcore sex, replacing most of it with some of the more pointless gore scenes. Just for good measure, Troma – who else – came along and added the hideous narrator.

I can’t confirm any of that, but it does make a lot of sense. My brain. My poor brain and loins.

By any yardstick, this is an atrocious piece of cinema devoid of any redeeming features. It is a real hack and slash job of porn actress acting, bad special effects, incoherent plot lines, tasteless references and appalling audio (Mr Narrator, I’m looking squarely at you.) It’s the kind of film that might appeal to the sweaty-handed eighteen year old who could be turned on by a tree if it had a bra nailed to it, or the creepy forty year old neighbour who listens to brass band music and collects lingerie catalogues, but for anyone of sound mind and body it is one to avoid.

I’ll tell you how bad this is. It almost made me want to watch a Michael Bay film. Almost. That’s a close shave my friends, closer than I ever want to go again.

By the way, if you have recently suffered a severe brain injury and you are interested in watching this, it is sometimes distributed as Bloodsucking Freaks 2. Despite the title, this film has nothing to do with the first film, except its’ strange penchant for pointlessly long torture scenes involving scantily clad women.

Things I Learned From This Movie:-
- Never trust roadside paramedics. Particularly ones in stockings and suspenders, asking you for help.
- Chainsaws are underused in operating theatres for good reason.
- Bald men make for cumbersome transport.
- Lap-dancing clubs are wise not to employ colour commentators.
- Watch where you are running, even when you are running from girls in underwear holding automatic weapons.
- In extreme cases, lingerie can invoke violence.
- Gardeners are truly rubbish peeping toms.
- If there is a God (and I have my doubts) he was in bed catatonic with flu whilst this was produced.

Things To Look Out For:-
There will be no RANDOM GRATUITOUS BREAST SHOTS! or else this review will need a second page. Just take it for granted – there are puppies everywhere.
Opening Credits – I wonder if Traci Lords knows that this is dedicated to her?
6mins – Maybe it is just me, but the actress on screen is giving us much more than the woman who dubbed her voice.
9mins – Galigula? Hahahaha! Who is ‘Galigula’? You mean, Caligula!
11mins – STOP THIS MUSIC.
22mins – Why is blood squirting from the corpse? It’s dead!
29mins – Please, stop this scene. Stop the spinning wheel effect. Stop gyrating. Just… stop!
37mins – I feel your pain sir, although not for the same reasons.
44mins – This music is not only bad, it’s being played badly!
52mins – Kill him. Kill him now! I’ve had fifty-two minutes of bad acting and I can’t take anymore.
55mins – You can still clearly see his feet attached to his legs. In fact, I think he’s still wearing his shoes.
57mins – END! END DAMN YOU!
62mins – That wasn’t Elvis! It looked more like John Lennon!
66mins – No bullet holes? Ran out of fake blood, did we?

Quotes:-
The Narrator – So now you know Ilsa’s terrible secret; the elements are in place. A tragedy can now unfold.

The Narrator - Life can be pretty boring at the clinic nowadays.

The Narrator – I bet it will be good! Greta has really gone to extremes in the world of cooking.

Greta – He used to eat my p***y so I can guarantee the quality of its taste…

The Narrator – A story in which no one has gained anything except death.