Paging JUNKIE NURSE

Movies are like drugs. If you are going to take them, it’s best to know which will best mix with your general mood… and occupation. You don’t snort coke before Quaker meeting. You don’t down a bottle of Night Train before competing in NASCAR. And, it’s best not to be  hooked on hydromorphones if you’re a health care professional. Of course, if JUNKIE NURSE were not, there wouldn’t be much of a story. Like Dilaudid — the title character’s brand of choice — the movie is a pain-numbing diversion with sufficient charms to counteract its paucity of hallucinatory vision. It’s a straight dose of a twisted set-up: the affable anti-hero, an aimless young murse, who gets his kicks from the pharmacy of the nursing home at which he’s employed. There are hints of Mike Judge and the Coen brothers within the deadpan, bedpan delivery and the senile square pegs he encounters on rounds. While director Jeffrey Jay Orgill can’t match those masters’ classes in satire, he does deliver a slight high, with no lingering side effects. Certainly, you won’t hate yourself in the morning, though you may question how much you can possibly remember.

JUNKIE NURSE, formerly known as BOPPIN’ AT THE GLUE FACTORY, won the STIFFY for Best Feature at the 2009 edition of the Seattle True Independent Film Festival.