In this month’s Playboy, model-actress Paz de la Huerta can be seen posing tastefully nude, but in the dreary slasher film Nurse, she’s not just nude, she’s naked (in a Hustler way), and all the less compelling for it. She’s Nurse Abby, who uses her body to lure married men into bed, only to murder them as punishment for their infidelity. In between killings, Abby drugs and then beds Danni (Katrina Bowden), a young nurse whose morning-after dismay prompts Abby to begin framing her for the murders.
Nurse, which includes, weirdly, a one-minute cameo by Kathleen Turner, is B-movie trash, a fact director Doug Aarniokoski and co-writer David Lowery never truly embrace, despite a finale drenched in blood and filled with knives flying at the film’s 3D camera. (Sorry, but don’t expect in-your-face close-ups of the star’s ample assets.)
As she’s forever reminding us in a leaden, unrelenting voiceover, Abby is seriously lonely and deeply depressed. She doesn’t even enjoy slashing the throats of lecherous men (Martin Donovan and Judd Nelson among them), and let’s be real: If the onscreen serial killer isn’t having fun, how can we?
