Sick Nurses, just now hitting DVD from Magnolia Pictures, is a Thai film known in its homeland as Suay Laak Sai. Directors Piraphan Laoyont and Thodsapol Siriwiwat are obviously familiar with recent Asian horror cinema as this one is very much in the image of The Ring, The Grudge and others. Production values are quite good, and some of the scares rank pretty high on the creep-o-meter, though the story is a cookie-cutter tale of ghostly revenge.

A group of nurses and Dr. Taa have a lucrative business selling bodies from the hospital they work at (a hospital, incidentally, that never seems to have any actual patients). One of the nurses, a girl named Tahwaan is engaged to Dr. Taa, but she catches him having sex with her sister Nook. When Tahwaan threatens to expose their corpse selling business, the others murder her to keep her quiet. As Ae points out, legend has it that the dead return for the one they love the most seven days after death. True enough, Tahwaan is soon back from the grave sporting that emo hairdo on steroids that all Asian ghosts seem to have these days and greenish black skin. The first time we see her in her spectral form, she quite memorably comes crawling out of a handbag.

She's dead, she's pissed off, and she quickly sets out to take revenge on her killers. Since she was killed to protect the nurses' income, each death scene relates to the victim's materialism or vanity. One girl is cocooned in seemingly endless strands of ghostly hair, another has a prized handbag fused to her head, and a bulimic girl is force-fed scalpel blades and has her jaw torn off, bringing her binging and purging days to an end. The film periodically returns to Tahwaan's murder, revealing new information each time, a device that would have been more effective had the revelations been more interesting. Meanwhile, Taa is being given the hospital's Doctor of the Year award, and we learn this all has something to do with his friend Tuwangwit.

Plot seems to be of secondary concern with the grisly, mostly well-done murder scenes taking center stage. It's been only seven days since the nurses have killed one of their own, but none of them seem particularly traumatized. I was also confused by the fact that one of the girls showers fully clothed for no other discernible reason than possibly attempting to appease censors in Thailand. There are a few mercifully brief attempts at humor, notably in a scene where an older doctor is caught flirting with young nurses by his wife. It's hard to tell if the problem is a cultural difference or the jokes are just bad, but either way the humor doesn't work. Don't go into this expecting anything breathtakingly new, but it's a horror flick that actually manages to be scary, and in my book that makes it worth a look.

The DVD allows for watching the film in the original Thai or dubbed into English with options for English or Spanish subtitles. The dubbing actors are sub-par, so I suggest going with the subtitles. Extras include trailers for other Magnolia Pictures releases and a making of featurette.

Tags: Cinema, Cinematical, Movies, Sick Nurses, SickNurses