• Written and directed by Alan Holleb
• Starring
  • Candice Rialson
  • Robin Mattson
  • Maria Rojo
  • Roger Cruz
• Produced by Julie Corman
• Executive produced by Roger Corman

The viewing pleasure of some movies is enhanced by their being dated. You know the ones I’m talking about — all of the ’50s Big Bug and Saucer Invasion movies. Somehow, their antique status lends a patina of innocence and respectability to drive-in flicks that are otherwise pretty low on the quality scale.

This movie is not one of them, because the decade of the ’70s does not lend itself to such a patina. Instead, on top of being expectedly cheap and tawdry, ’70s B-movies have the added disadvantage of being bizarre in ways that are hard for viewers to comprehend without treating them as alien artifacts.

Case in point: Candy Stripe Nurses.

Just to let those of us in fin du siecle America know how strange a society we are observing, we open with high school girl Marisa (Maria Rojo) whittling a piece of wood in a school yard. A bow-tied teacher gently reminds her that such weapons are not allowed on school property; when she does not voluntarily relinquish it, he snatches it from her — whereupon she jumps him and clubs him with the wood. All of this is played for laughs. Now, I don’t know about you, but the ’90s were pretty hard to ignore, and I think the audience that once would have found schoolyard weapons and student/teacher violence funny has had that tendency beaten out of them by, well, real-world schoolyard weapons and student/teacher violence.

That’s a problem pandemic in this movie; matters are treated lightly which now, in our post-AIDS, post-Columbine, post-LA riots, post-Cobain world, are seen as far too heavy. Let’s take a look at some.

Our basic premise is the lives of three high school girls working as candystripers (that’s volunteer nurses, in case you don’t know) at the hospital: Marisa, whom we’ve already met; Sandy (Candice Rialson), the high-society girl who uses the occasion to score with her doctor-boyfriend and anyone else who catches her eye; and Dianne (Robin Mattson), a dancer-artiste who intends to be a doctor. All three girls know each other, and interact minimally during the movie, but to all intents and purposes the three stories are completely separate, and could just as easily have been presented a an anthology of short nurse stories than a single feature. In fact, just for convenience’s sake, I’m going to let you know about the three stories as if they were told separately.

We’ve already met Marisa; let’s stay with her for a bit. Sent to do volunteer work in lieu of a real punishment, she soon meets a young Hispanic man who was implicated quite accidentally in a gas station holdup (wrong place at the wrong time). Bonded by the fact that neither one feels they can beat “the system,” she starts hunting down the single witness to the crime, a youngster with a custom-painted motorcycle. In doing so, she draws the attention of the real culprits, and almost gets herself raped for her trouble before she catches the bad guys red-handed.

Sandy, meanwhile, spends some time in the linen closet with a young doctor and some time in a hospital bed with a patient, before becoming the substitute receptionist at the sex clinic. Seeing major rock star Owen Boles (Kendrew Lascelles) consult the doctor over his drug-induced complete lack of sex drive, she passes herself off a as a sex therapist to visit him at home and maybe score a point with a famous guy.

And finally, Dianne and her incredibly goony haircut meet a handsome college basketball player, Cliff, in the ER; their love springs up and grows, but she’s increasingly worried by his secret drug problem, spurred by his team doctor.

Each of these stories has elements that just seem plain weird to a viewer in 2001. For instance:

- Aside from the lenient treatment of Marisa’s acting-out, we have an almost-rape presented not only as a not-terribly-traumatic experience, but as this story’s only excuse to expose Marisa’s breasts. (Well, there’s also an artsy scene that appears to be Marisa’s daydream about making love to Carlos, but shot in such high-contrast lighting as to be very confusing.) People who hate the prurient use of rape scenes in Humanoids From the Deep would have a field day with this.

- When a senior doctor finds Sandy naked in a patient’s bed, he treats it as an inevitable annoyance, grimacing in exasperated resignation. That’s it. Girls will be girls, I suppose.

- Cliff’s “seduction” of Dianne reeks of almost as much coercion as Marisa’s almost-rape. Taking Dianne alone into the gymnastics practice room, he uses every date-rape line in the book — “We both know why you’re here,” etc. — and chases her aroun the room, until she collapses, suddenly acquiescing (and giggling to boot) into his arms. That’s what women really like, right? A man who teaches a woman that she really means “yes” when she says “no,” right?

- When the sex clinic doctor (who looks like a long-lost member of Bare-Naked Ladies) discovers sandy listening at the door during his consultation with Boles, he doesn’t dismiss her, doesn’t lecture her on patient confidentiality –he just gives her a disapproving glance and sends her back to work.

- Heck, the whole idea is high-school girls showing frontal nudity is just plain weird. Sex-comedies these days usually go to great lengths to show that the participating characters are all legal adults; even high-school students are normally labelled as 18-year-old seniors before tops are doffed. Here, no mention is made of it; while the actresses are certainly over 18 (Maria Rojo was born in 1943!), there’s no indication that their characters are.

You may think, in looking at the description above, that the result of mixing those three stories would be a very short movie indeed, shorter even than the 75-minute running time. And you would be right. The only way we make it to full feature length is through padding: Marisa driving, Chuck playing basketball, Sandy driving, Chuck playing more basketball, Dianne and Chuck watching hanggliders (actually, stock hangglider footage with an oh-so-interested dialog voiceover), an uninteresting Dick Miller cameo…

Somehow, combining the disconcerting elements and the just-plain-boring elements, we end up with a movie in which frequent exhibition of breasts just doesn’t overcome the demerits. It’s just forgettable, and if it weren’t for Roger Corman’s name in the credits, it would already have been forgotten.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 12 (not counting the animated sequence under the opening credits)
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 1, maybe
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• streakers: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
  • Don Keefer (Dr. Wilson) played “Cromwell” in the classic episode “Assignment Earth”
  • Bill Erwin (the principal) played “Commander Dalen Quaice” in the TNG episode “Remember Me”
  • Dick Miller (the critical spectator) played a vendor in the TNG episode “The Big Goodbye” and “Vin” in the DS9 two-parter “Past Tense”