Written and directed by Brea Grant (who got launched to wide notice in her role on Heroes back in the day), 12 Hour Shift is a horror/comedy/heist/farce that takes a minute to get going but that I found extremely entertaining. Mandy is a junkie nurse working night shifts at a small Arkansas hospital. She is involved in a human organ trafficking ring where she and a supervisor procure the organs - Mandy is the one who kills the patients - which are delivered to a local thug by Mandy's dumb-as-a-stump cousin (by marriage) Regina. When Regina loses the kidney she was supposed to deliver, she asks the reluctant and pissed off Mandy to help her get another one. Things start to unravel when Regina tries to take care of it herself, resulting in friendly but ineffective cops bumbling around, an escaped convict (David Arquette), drug overdoses, needy patients and terrible birthday cake. Plus a really excellent hallway dance sequence.
Mandy, played by the always good Angela Bettis, is a fantatsic character: capable but strung out, frustrated, annoyed, loyal, grumpy. I thought the Regina character started out ridiculous but by the end, well, she was still ridiculous but I liked her.
In addition to being fairly gory (but never scary, so not really horror per se) and a bit lightweigtht, 12 Hour Shift actually does a good job of portraying what nurses must have to go through: fatigue and stress, and having to muster kindness and compassion in the face of it, having to deal with people literally all the time, the stuggle to care for your patients when you sometimes find it difficult to care about anything at all. Those realistic moments were as disturbing as any of the "scary" stuff.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment