All Rise...

Judge P.S. Colbert once had a "Private Duty Nurse," but he's not sharing details with the public.

The Charge

"Oh, wow! Is that a water bed?"

The Case

I love a good pizza, piping hot and fresh from the oven. I also enjoy cold pizza the next day, but I put it in context: it's not as good, and it's now snack food, as opposed to a meal. By the same token, I enjoyed watching each entry of Roger Corman's The Nurses Collection, fully aware that save for the guilty pleasure, I was wasting my time.

Essentially conceived as cinematic wallpaper to hang in the background while "audience" members engaged in illicit behaviors in the foreground (at the drive-in or a rundown theater in a shady part of town), each of these films contain segments guaranteed to make the fully-engaged viewer go "Huh? What's going on? Why did this just happen? What does that mean?" What it means is that you missed the point, precisely because you're paying too close attention!

These movies originally ran willy-nilly, slotted for mix 'n match, multi-feature packages, brew-and-views, or midnight screenings, and now their legacy on DVD seems destined to be just as spotty. This latest 4-fer comes to you from the good-timers at Shout! Factory, but less than two years ago, Appellate Judge Tom Becker reviewed the very same quartet as part of Infinity Entertainment's full-frame presentation Roger Corman's Best of the B's, Collection 2: Naughty Nurses and Tawdry Teachers; though his point about "basically watching the same film over and over again" remains unimpeachable.

Here's all you need to know…

• There are four nurses on every one-sheet movie poster, but only three nurses in each movie.

• The blonde nurse (or the brunette nurse) will be involved in the humorous plot.

• The brunette nurse (or the blonde nurse) will be involved in the kinky plot.

• The nurse of color (3 black, 1 Hispanic) will be involved in the political plot.

• Each lead actress will submit to at least one display of frontal nudity from the waist up, total nudity from behind, and no pubic hair, though this last rule is violated by degrees in each film.

The visual quality of these films is variable, but watchable. Each is presented in standard definition 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen. The Dolby 2.0 Mono tracks are slightly worse for wear, particularly on Private Duty Nurses which literally sounds like a scratchy phonograph record all the way through. Unfortunately, there are no subtitles provided for the-hard-of-hearing. For extras, we get two short featurettes each with a mixture of interesting anecdotes and self-aggrandizing talk about the making of these films.

Need a little soft-core kitsch in your library? This reasonably priced set certainly gives you a bang for your buck. That's right, I went there!

The Verdict

What am I, Rick Santorum? Not Guilty!

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