Nurse
Mandy makes Dr. House look like a paragon of abstinence and empathy. He was
just hooked on pain-killers. She needs harder stuff. Fortunately, her hospital
work gives her access to dying patients and their highly-flippable organs. The
arrangement had been working well until she brought in her empty-headed cousin
(by marriage) as the courier. When a kidney goes missing, it leads to a dark,
violent night in Brea Grant’s 12 Hour Shift, which would have screened
at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, were it not for the CCP’s cover-up of the
Wuhan outbreak and WHO’s subsequent collusion denying human-to-human
transmission.
Karen,
the admitting nurse, runs operation in the hospital. Technically, Nurse Mandy
does the killing, but they are usually more like euthanasia than murder. Of
course, they make it look like natural causes. Cousin Regina is just
responsible for ferrying the cooler from the hospital loading dock to the
thuggish Nicholas, who handles the customer side of the business. Yet, somehow,
she manages to lose a pre-sold kidney on this fateful night. That means Nurse
Mandy will have to improvise to save Regina’s neck (or at least her kidney).
It
turns out this 1999 night will be the perfect storm of trouble. In addition to
the cop killer who was just admitted with his rent-a-cop minder, Mandy’s estranged
step-brother also came in comatose after an overdose. Plus, most of the local
cops are out-of-town for a Y2K preparedness conference. Frankly, Nurse Mandy would
probably keep matters from getting out of hand, were it not for Regina’s
misguided attempts to take the initiative. Things really get messy (and blood-splattered)
as a result.
Shift
is
often amusing in a one-darned-thing-after-another kind of way, but its
condescending attitude towards the small-town Arkansas characters gets tiresome
quickly. Not every Arkansan is an opioid-addicted Jesus Freak, just like not
every Los Angelino is a welfare-cheating gang member. Nevertheless, the
uber-caustic, ultra-deadpan performance of Angela Bettis as Nurse Mandy is a
thing of beauty. Frankly, she mostly just hits one or two notes, but what
cutting notes they are.
Nikea
Gamby-Turner matches her note-for-acid-dripped-note as Nurse Karen. Chloe
Farnworth is just spectacularly clueless, to the point of being downright dangerous,
as Cousin Regina. Kit Williamson is also likably loopy as Officer Myer, the “nice
guy” cop. However, producer David Arquette largely falls back on familiar shtick
as Jefferson, the ferocious cop-killer.
Somehow,
Grant manages to distract viewers from her characters’ appalling crimes through
her screwball pacing. Even the film itself seems to lose track of its
body-count. However, her periodic attempts at hipster stylization fall embarrassingly
flat. Still, it is worth watching Bettis do her cynical thing. Recommended for
cult movie fans, who like their comedies bloody and nihilistic, 12 Hour
Shift would have screened at this year’s Tribeca, but it is likely to get
picked up for distribution regardless.
