Night Call Nurses
1972 Alana Collins
Teaser Storyline for Night Call Nurses Barbara (PATRICIA T. BYRNE), Janis (ALANA COLLINS), and Sandra (MITTIE LAWRENCE) are three charming young nurses specializing in psychiatric therapy. As the film opens we see Sandra running frantically to save a beautiful young patient from suicide. She reaches the girl only seconds before she throws herself nude from the roof of the hospital. Sandra's colleagues, Barbara and Janis reassure her that the patient's death was not her fault, but Sandra-still very upset about the experience- resolves to do all she can to help other potential suicide victims. The following day she volunteers at the Suicide Prevention Center." Janis. on night duty in Emergency, receives a young truck driver, Kyle Toby (RICHARD YOUNG) who has overdosed on speed. A King of the Road" he has become almost addicted to amphetamines to make his tight schedule and bring his rig in on time. Janis stays by Kyle during his hallucinations and withdrawal and soon takes more than just a professional interest in his welfare. As their relationship
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grows she tries to get him off speed by interesting him in other stimulating activities: sky-diving, water-skiing, and, of course, love-making. Barbara, in the meantime, has become deeply involved in a special encounter therapy group headed by Dr. Bramlett (CLINT KIMBROUGH), a brilliant young psychiatrist, famous for his unorthodox methods. Having received (as have both Sandra and Janis) several threatening and suggestive notes scrawled in lip. stick by what she assumes is a patient in the hospital, Barbara is very interested in deviant behavior. This makes her a perfect guinea pig" for Bramlett. His bizarre theory is that any normal person can be pushed into deviant behavior (sexual or otherwise) if made to believe that he does have submerged deviant tendencies. At the encounter session one weekend, he rigs up a false recording by which Barbara is led to believe that she is definitely a subnormal deviant. When the rest of the encounter group discusses society's role in making one ashamed of one's body- and few of these experimenters are, as we see-Barbara becomes extremely upset and refuses to participate in the nude session. She runs from Bramlett's house in hysterics and the following morning returns to try to run him down in her car. Sandra, while at the Suicide Prevention Center, joins forces with Jude (FELTON PERRY), an ex-con, intent on saving the life of his former cell-mate, Sampson (STACK PIERCE), a victim of recent prison riots. The corrupt prison officials have tried to make their brutal and bigoted attacks on this natural Black leader seem like a suicide attempt, and Sandra and Jude fear that they will try to finish the job soon. They arrange with Kyle and Janis to spring Sampson from the center and take him in Kyle's rig to a private plane which will fly him to Africa and freedom. Disguising him in the bandages of a burn victim, they hustle him from the center and into Kyle's rig. Jude fends off the police with dynamite and finally has to shotgun the warden's assistant, but Sampson escapes successfully. Bramlett, in the meantime, has convinced Barbara that she is a deviant and has seduced her "as a cure." When he finally reveals that she has been nothing more than an experiment to him, she threatens to expose him to the entire medical profession. Bramlett himself then reveals his own dangerous tendencies and strikes her. Just as he does so Cal, an orderly who has been writing the lipstick notes appears on the scene. Unknown to Bramlett and Barbara he has been watching their entire evening of love-making and arguments. A transvestite, he has dressed himself in a nurse's uniform. He cracks Bramlett's skull with a wine bottle and then attacks Barbara with a meat cleaver. It is only Barbara's clever professional handling of Cal which saves her own life and Bramlett's, as she persuades Cal that as a 'real nurse" he should save lives not destroy them.
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