Once upon a time, a hospital nurse went on a killing rampage due to her disdain for all the inconvenient ill patients she was forced to care for under degrading circumstances. She was self-righteous in all her exploitative disregard for human life, so she went bezerk and then committed suicide. The end.

Oh, my bad.
Wrong movie.
VERY wrong. But I had you going there, right?  

The Slasher Nurse has nothing to do with a nurse. Nor is this related to healthcare. Or fellow patients. In fact, this is another common revenge plot stemming from a childhood prank gone terribly wrong. The unconventional component is the gore, but we’ll get to that soon enough.  

High school friends Grace and Piper venture off to scope out an abandoned residence (turned local haunt) in hopes of filming their first student horror movie. As they explore this funhouse to get some ideas through the creepy clowns and ghostly décor, the girls are overcome with an eerie feeling that they are not alone. Instantly, one of the “mechanical” monsters moves and they immediately scramble to outrun the costumed deviant. As Grace finds herself outside the house of horrors in an apparent joke, she realizes Piper may still be trapped inside, and the fear of losing her bestie soars.  

The Slasher Nurse (man, it’s so tough to wrap my head around this irrelevant title) has the makings of a great thriller based on a sophomoric hoax that will clearly affect the lives of these precocious teens for years to come. Instead, it turned into a long and drawn-out escapade of over-the-top slayings by a superhuman psychiatric patient seeking retribution from a 20-year-old incident that albeit severe, was never intentionally malicious.    

How I wish that storyline carried on within the gap of time rather than hyperspaces us to a reunion between old chums, planning a trip to a friend’s cabin in the woods. (FYI - nothing related to that film either.)    

Ok, back on track now, we have middle-aged folks who are more self-indulgent than concerned about their former friend who was so traumatized from that event two decades ago, the “escaped patient” Piper doesn’t faze any of them except Grace. Confident they aren’t targets or just stupidly thinking about other contrived matters such as cheating partners and making moves on co-workers, they carry on with the weekend getaway pulling out a Ouija board and other antics that trigger Grace. Whatever the tangent may be, it fails to keep my attention. Miserably.    

Some bright moments include setting a person on fire, an electric knife, a hatchet, lawnmower and let’s not forget the ultimate death-by-bear-trap! Because what would a real horror film set in the woods be, without a humongous bear trap, right?  

The gore is icky and excessive with various overblown attempts at realistic slaughters that step over the border into overkill territory. At the same time, the ill-fated fight scenes have the opposite effect: tame and lame. Through a bloodbath of severed body parts and a whole lot of goo, it was tough to get past the amount of unnecessary slaughters and into a more substantial reckoning of revenge. What a shame.