Review of Private Duty Nurses

This movie was a follow-up to the hit Roger Corman quickie The Student Nurses and went along similar lines, but had a completely different cast, a much schlockier tone and no story carry-over whatsoever. Once again, the idea was to weave together a story of young professionals trying to succeed amid the temptations of the swinging early 70s. The cast of attractive but inexperienced unknowns try their best, but the way out story line does them few favors. There is the usual soft-core cinema titillation, with the camera following the girls in their tight uniforms along hospital corridors, and then off to parties where they smoke dope, take off their tops and have sex, but after the first movie it began to seem repetitive. So, instead of focusing on the career and personal tribulations of the girls as the first movie did, this movie's makers went all out trying to get in everything ELSE they could think of that was relevant to the day and as a result this movie is ludicrously overloaded with sensationalistic exploitation movie nonsense - murderers, drug pushers etc. - which shifts the focus away from the characters and not to any good purpose. The characters aren't very interesting, but neither is the story.

The resulting movie is now rather horribly dated, totally unbelievable and not very much fun to sit through, even as camp. The dialogue probably sounded fairly hip at the time (or maybe it didn't) but it is pretty laughable now, as are the attempts to make the party scenes seem exciting by using a lot of way out psychedelic camera angles and tricky edits (spins, tilts etc.). That stuff was actually a few years old by the time this movie was made and had become a tad clichéd.