Nurse Sherri

Sherri Bobbins

Nurse Sherri
aka Black Voodoo
USA 1978
Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Bizarre spoilers ensue.

Wow... that Al Adamson guy keeps surprising me. I watched Nurse Sherri on the same day that I watched his bizarre musical sci-fi sex comedy Cinderella 2000 (reviewed here) and, believe me, Nurse Sherri was an even stranger experience, tonally, than the former.

So if you look at the trailers for Nurse Sherri you will be sold a film about the demonic possession of a young nurse in the style of something like The Exorcist and... well, it’s certainly a horror movie of sorts but, for one thing, if you’re looking for a scary movie then this isn’t it. And for another, well, let me describe the first few scenes of the movie for you here.

First up we have another animated title sequence similar to those adorning the openings of a lot of Adamson’s films involving various photos and images moved around. And my first thought as I was watching this is that the score, which continues over various scenes throughout the movie, sounded way too old for a 1970s horror movie. At first I thought it was just library music except I also realised I recognised the tune. A quick trip to the IMDB confirmed my suspicions... the film seems to be needle drop scored with some of Dominic Frontiere’s music to the old sci-fi TV show The Outer Limits.

Anyway, the film starts with some scenes from many reshoots Adamson took part in to expand the character of an old ‘occult specialist’ who dies on an operating table early in the movie. There is a sequence shot in the desert where he and a bunch of ‘faithful’ friends of a dead person attempt to raise the person back from death over the space of a number of days. Alas, instead of raising the recently deceased gentleman, the guy collapses as if possessed. We then get his death scene at hospital as Nurse Sherri, played by Jill Jacobson, watches as her doctor boyfriend Peter, played by Geoffrey Land, fails to save his life. And this is where this horror movie takes a bizarre and strange turn...

Following on from this we have a full on naked sex scene where Sherri and Peter are at it for a considerably longer time than you would expect from a scene in any other horror movie. It’s not shy about what it’s showing either. Okay, I thought, this was a mite unusual but, then... after the two are recovering, Sherri asks the good doctor what his strangest sexual experience was. We then get a long flashback to him in his younger days, as he attempts to give a lecture to a class full of students while one of them is giving him a hidden blow job from under his lectern.Wait, what? After a while we go back to Sherri and Peter on the bed and then it’s his turn to ask Sherri what her strangest sexual encounter was... at which point we flash back again to a poolside scene where Sherri is seduced in a lesbian sex scene. Well, this has got to be one of the most ‘off the point’ horror films I’ve ever seen. This is all compounded by another scene when we get back to the hospital and a man is nervous about having an operation. So one of the nurses removes her clothing and starts sexing him up to relax him. So far, this had not been the spectacle of demonic terror I was expecting, to tell you the truth.

After a while, Sherri’s best friend Nurse Tara, played by the incomparable Adamson regular Marilyn Joi, turns up and goes to look in on an all star American football player who has been blinded. It doesn’t take long, of course, for her to remove her clothes and start boning up on the game with him.

Now, in between these unusual sex scenes, there are actually scenes which carry the demonic plot forward. Later scenes with flashbacks explain that the old man who died on the hospital bed has possessed Sherri, which kind of makes sense since every now and again she’ll accidentally let her demon show by talking in ‘croaky old man’s voice’ courtesy of some dubbing. However, we also see a scene from much later than the hospital scene where some bizarrely animated... I can only call it glowy slime sludgy stuff... crawls onto her body and kind of seeps into her. What this has to do with the old occult geezah I have no idea but pretty soon, presumably as a result of this bizarre phenomenon, Sherri starts turning up in unexpected places and doing strange and ‘plot questionable’ killings.

For instance, she’ll turn up at the mini ranch of a retired ‘cowboy hat wearing’ doctor and, for no reason whatsoever and in a scene which has played out, content wise, in at least two other Adamson movies... she sticks a big pitchfork through his back before driving all the way back to hospital again. And it goes on like this for a while, with little inserts of almost non-sequitur horror scenes, surrounded by scenes where everyone seems to think they are in a softcore, sexy nurse movie.

Luckily, Tara’s blinded football star patient had a voodoo priestess for a grandmother and, when everyone starts talking about how strange Nurse Sherri has been lately... like turning up with blood all over her hands and face and speaking like an old man... he tells them that they have to dig the old man up from his grave and burn his body to release his hold on the titular nurse. Which they do, just about saving Peter who is about to get hacked to death by Sherri, wielding two machete’s after she has just killed her carer. Why Sherri has so many framed photographs of different breeds of dogs in her apartment is never explained to anyone’s satisfaction nor, indeed, even questioned by anyone.

And although things don’t end as happily as they could for Sherri, most people in the movie get a slightly happier ending. It’s a strange film though and I honestly thought that Adamson had done another patchwork job on this one, where he’d maybe started off shooting a sexy nurse film due to Roger Corman’s recent success at kick starting that genre and then decided a third of the way through the shoot that they were going to do a horror movie instead but, no, according to the section of the accompanying booklet in Severin’s amazing Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection Blu Ray boxed set, the plan was actually to shoot a horror/sexy nurse hybrid from the start. So colour me baffled. Also, though, the description of the film mentioned in the booklet also mentions some scenes shot in 35mm which are curiously absent from this original 16mm cut of the movie... so I don’t know if those sequences are lost or have turned up elsewhere.

Either way, if you want to see one of the most tonally bizarre movies that Adamson has done (and if you’ve read some of my Adamson reviews lately you’ll know he directed or doctored some curious hybrids in the course of his career), then Nurse Sherri would be my recommendation for that kind of experience. Really pleased I saw this one.

Lucifer's Women/Doctor Dracula

Svengali VS Dracula

Lucifer’s Women
USA 1974 Directed by Paul Aratow

Doctor Dracula
USA 1978 Directed by
Al Adamson & Paul Aratow
Rafael Films/AIP/Vinegar Syndrome Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Yeah, this one has spoilers
if you’re worried about that kind of stuff.

This is another one of those stories where a film was made, Lucifer’s Women... and then, four years later, Al Adamson was asked to direct a whole load of new scenes and recut it with bits of the original picture, making and releasing what amounts to a completely different movie with kind of ‘guest highlights’ from the first version. In many cases the originals were often better than Adamson’s, admittedly enthusiastic effort to turn them into completely different films and, yeah, this one is no exception.

Lucifer’s Women is a case of the original being thought lost until the wonderful Vinegar Syndrome label managed to release an uncut, fully restored version of it to Blu Ray a couple of years ago. I’m really glad they did because, otherwise, the Adamson excerpts would have been all that remained of what is actually a pretty good movie. I’ll review the original first.

Lucifer’s Women is a real gem... a kind of marriage of an occult plot mixed with soft core pornography. This one stars Larry Hankin as an academic writer who has published a book about Svengali, only to have been helped by the ‘Bleeding Rose’ society in the form of his publisher, a black psychic, to become possessed by the spirit of Svengali himself. So Hankin is Svengali, who is also, on occasion, fighting a battle with his former self to control his host body.

The film starts strongly with one of his magic shows (there are at least two magic acts by him in the film) where he levitates a woman and cuts off her clothing so she’s floating topless. I don’t know what night clubs he plays but we never got magic shows like this on television in the UK in the seventies.

Anyway, his publisher wants him to procure a specific girl, Trilby, played by the wonderful Jane Brunel-Cohen. She is one of a number of strippers who work in a night club run by obnoxious pimp Roland, played by Paul Thomas (oh yeah, I’ll get to him in a minute). Svengali’s task is to bring the girl to his publisher Sir Stephen (played by Norman Pierce) in seven days’ time... because she has a pure, psychically charged soul she is not aware of... and hypnotically manipulate her while having sex in a black magic ritual with Sir Stephen so that she first kills Stephen on the stroke of midnight at the point of orgasm... and then kills herself so that his soul can be reborn in her body.

However, complicating things is the fact that Svengali’s body’s former personality is falling in love with Trilby. Shenanigans ensue and the film has a wonderful, laid back charm of its own as another girl also falls prey to Sir Stephen and his occultist friends, while Trilby and her fellow stripper and room mate indulge in lesbian sex ripped straight from the pages of an underground comic book she is reading. Finally, there's a threesome with their boss Roland... who is later put in a trance by Svengali and accidentally gets run over because of it.

There’s a bizarre double ending too, where Svengali’s former personality rescues the girl and everyone else dies... but, as they run off, another Svengali and all his friends are suddenly alive again, watching and laughing from the grounds of their big house. It’s a little like the end of Fellini’s Eight And A Half in tone, rather than a conclusion from which you are meant to gain any insight from, I think.

But, I found myself thoroughly entertained as it’s a nice little movie including an interesting score which has a kind of mild atonalism with creepy but charming synthesiser overlays on top of it in some sections. And some interesting personalities... despite what one of his co-stars says of him in the extras, Larry Hankin is a tremendous Svengali. He has hypnotic, expressive eyes and a kind of laid back attitude which really works for him and the movie. Jane Brunel-Cohen is absolutely amazing too, giving off ‘young Margot Kidder’ vibes and channeling that same kind of ‘naive innocent energy’. I can’t believe that her only other credit, apart from archival footage from this used in Adamson’s Doctor Dracula, was as a masseuse in Freebie And The Bean. This woman should have gone on to be a huge star, if there was any justice in the world.

And then there’s Paul Thomas. Starring in almost 400 adult movies and directing almost 500 of them to date, Paul Thomas is a porn star who also had a mainstream movie career around the same time, for a bit... you may recognise him as playing Peter in the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar. And he gives a hilarious, 20 minute interview about his time on the film (one of his last mainstream movies) and his career in general. In one story he talks about the threesome involving Jane Brunel-Cohen and how she didn’t want his ‘hard cock’ touching her because she wasn’t a porn actress. He says that usually, on one of his porn shoots, the crew has to keep taking breaks to enable the lead male actor to be able to achieve and maintain his erection again for the next shot... which is a hard thing to do, apparently. Here, it was the exact opposite situation... he was so enamoured of the actress that he kept getting an erection and, since it was an R rated movie, they couldn’t afford to have his penis getting into the shots... so they kept having to take breaks to try and get his erection to cease and desist while piecing together the scene. It’s a great extra and worth a watch almost as much as the film.

And then there’s Doctor Dracula. Okay, so Adamson has a new, animated title sequence more in keeping with many of his other movies of this time. He grafts a completely new story onto it involving psychiatrist Dr. Gregorio (played by Geoffrey Land) who kills a lady at the start by biting her on the neck... as he’s really Dracula. The film uses bits of the Lucifer’s Women footage as a background canvass for Dracula’s efforts to stop the Bleeding Rose Society, now headed up by John Carradine in a number of spliced in scenes trying to look like they all belong with the original movie.

It’s about what you’d expect from one of Adamson’s more ‘hands on’ cut and paste jobs and some of the scenes kind of make sense and others don’t. Adamson’s characters are all played by completely different actors in fresh roles (including his wife Regina Carrol, giving some bad line readings in this) but he did manage to get Larry Hankin back for a few new scenes in an effort to integrate the two films together more credibly... including a scene where Hankin crosses two candles in an effort to kill Dracula, but dies instead.

The bizarre thing is... although Adamson adds scenes of women undressing and having baths... you never see any nudity in this cut of the movie. This includes all the footage recycled from the original film, where the sex and nudity has been completely excised from this ‘lowlights’ version. This must have made for some bizarre jumps in logic for people who hadn’t seen Lucifer’s Women. For example, when asked about the nature of what she does, Trilby talks about it just being a job and, unless you had seen the original cut where you see she works as a stripper in a night club, you might have been scratching your head at this point wondering what the heck they are talking about.

Similarly, the character of Roland is barely glimpsed in one brief scene from the start in this one... he’s been taken out almost completely. So when Svengali confesses in a throw away line to Trilby later that he’s killed him, the audience must have found it strange, to say the least, that this character had killed someone... especially since it’s someone they don’t know about. Cutting these scenes back into a completely different movie sure makes for a lot of problems here, that’s for sure. Not to mention the  comic moments of a night club audience watching a magic show then cutting to a close up of people like John Carradine, who are also suddenly supposed to be part of the same audience. Stuff like this kept me smiling, for sure but, not necessarily for the right reasons.

I found it interesting that both directors used posters in character's bedrooms from famous films but that, neither shot made it into each other’s version. In Lucifer’s Women, Trilby has a Sands Of Iwo Jima poster in her apartment. In Doctor Dracula, random female victim number ‘whatever’ has a poster for Cassavetes’ A Woman Under The Influence in her house. So we have one director acknowledging his admiration for classic Hollywood and Adamson showing his support of the contemporary independent scene. Good stuff.

At the end of Doctor Dracula, the film finishes with the cult all deceased and then, when Dracula gets into a car with one of his victim’s daughters (played by Susie Ewing), she blows the car up with a remote device in her hand, killing them both. Being as this is Adamson, I immediately recognised the shot of the car blowing up as featuring in at least one of his other movies. I’m not sure if it was recycled for this one or whether this was the first use of the footage but, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

And that’s me done on these two. I had a really good time with Lucifer’s Women and would recommend it... not such a good time at all with the Adamson, recalibrated Doctor Dracula version but at least it’s interesting to see how that director would take the material and reshape it, although I’d probably say steer clear of that version. Either way, Vinegar Syndrome’s welcome Blu Ray release of the 'two on one' edition is pretty good and worth the admission price, as far as I’m concerned. So thanks to them for their ‘Half Way To Black Friday’ sale, where I picked up a few of their titles.