The title says it all about Sick Nurses, a slickly executed and extremely grisly ghost story about a sexy hospital staff paying the price for selling bodies on the black market. Pushing local censorship laws to the limit, T-horror bloodbath will find its way onto the viewing lists of genre buffs.
Clocking in at a trim 82 minutes, pic wastes no time getting to the gruesome heart of the matter. In an operating theater with cocktail lounge lighting, handsome medico Dr. Tah and six fetching nurses are engaged in supplying cadavers to bodyparts traders. Victim snuffed out in opening set piece is one of their own, Tahwan, who threatened to squeal after discovering her sister, Nook, had also caught the doc's roving eye.
Flashing forward to the corresponding time seven days later, scenario finds Tah winning the hospital's Doctor of the Year award. Meanwhile, the green-skinned ghost of Tahwan is preparing to fulfill local superstitions about the dead returning to claim their lovers.
First on the ghoul's agenda is settling the score with her bitchy sisters-in-crime, all of whom meet ghastly ends related to obsessions with body image and materialism. Imaginatively staged offings include death by handbag, and a particularly bloody end with surgical saws for lesbian twins Am and Orn.
As terrified victims flee from one incongruously decorated and notably empty hospital room to the next, events rise just above standard slasher mechanics with shots of jet-black humor and some nifty surprises.
Cast is mainly debutants whose variable perfs are covered up for the most part by keen editing and vigorous direction by the capable helming duo. Lenser Chitti Urnorakankij has a field day with a riot of primary colors in which blood red inevitably dominates. Effects work is solid, apart from some rubbery limbs. (Variety, 11th June 2007)
Richard Kuipers