Between a Rick And a Hag Place.

Our next tape off the pile is Igor Auzin's Aussie teleplay Night Nurse from 1978. Yet another distinct coverbox from back in the day. What was it about wheelchairs that makes them so creepy? From a horror marketing perspective anyway. Let's find out!

Looking for a clean break from her domineering boyfriend Rick (Gary Day), Prudence (Kate Fitzpatrick) takes a job as a live-in caregiver of a former opera singer known only as “The Diva” (Davina Whitehouse). Her employer seems welcoming enough, but the other servant of the house Clara (Kay Taylor), makes it clear she does not want to share.

Night Nurse is a fairly entertaining yarn. I did not know going in it was a TV movie, but in retrospect it makes sense. It has the clean, straightforwardness of a teleplay with barely any sharp edges to speak of. Despite that, it is still quite engaging. Prudence is a likeable character, even if she does come across as a doormat initially. Her artist boyfriend Rick is a douche of the highest order, yet she continues to bend to his will, even letting him weasel his way into the estate to paint the Diva's portrait.

Davina Whitehouse (left) & Katefitzpatrick in Night Nurse.

I feel her pain though, because once she's finally gotten away, she has to deal with the repeated abuse from her co-worker, Clara. Nothing she does is right, and something as simple as remembering the marmalade will get your pet goldfish murdered. Yet, she perservers because she knows going back to Rick is a step backwards.

Prudence & Clara (Kay Taylor) face off.

The story unfolds and once The Diva names Prudence as her new heir, that really gets Clara's blood boiling. It all ends in the cellar where Clara has a freak “ax-ident” and Prudence makes her escape. I was thinking of that Rube-Goldbergian end to the former help and that sequence is probably the one that stuck with young children who saw it on television. You know, “scary” TV movies that played in the seventies and eighties were pretty tame for the most part, but they usually had that one scene you never forgot.

Night Nurse was the fourth of ten films that Australia's Channel Seven commisioned from this production company so they were deep into pumping out content at this point. Whitehouse would later go on to appear in Peter Jackson's Braindead, and Kate Fitzpatrick has had a long, storied career that still continues to this day.

To conclude, this movie isn't going to get your blood pumping or anything, but it's still a decently acted and executed mystery.