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Released by: Video-X-Pix
Released on: 06/01/2009
Director: Shaun Costello
Cast: Valerie Marron, Jeffery Hurst, Jamie Gillis, Fred J. Lincoln, Nancy Wang, Sandy Fox
Year: 1974
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The Movie:
How do you describe this one…. A man named Dr. Canute (Jeffrey Hurst) runs a Veterans Hospital and, wanting to make life better for the man who had served in Vietnam and are now in his care, decides that he'll spice up their lives by bringing in a series of Vaudeville style entertainment and letting the solider boys fuck the nurses.
As the movie plays out we witness tap dancers, comedians, vocalists and more all doing their thing to entertain the troops, interspersed with graphic hardcore sex scenes. The result is a ridiculously disjointed film that, intentionally or not, puts the comedy before the sex and which probably confused the Hell out of the seventies audiences who paid to see this one in the theater during its original run.
According to director Shaun Costello's (who plays an amputee in the film) own comments, this film was originally shot in 1971 by Doug Collins under the title An American In Bethseda and it was intended to be a pornographic musical. Not surprisingly, Collins couldn't sell the movie so Costello was brought on board to spice it up with some more XXX footage. Collins had come into financial trouble and needed to come up with some cash, so he sold Costello the movie and it was turned into a more explicit picture and retitled Teenage Nurses and played The Capri in Manhattan in 1975.
So basically what you wind up with is a strange film made even stranger by the hardcore inserts. The sex is unappealing and rarely erotic, if dutifully performed by the cast. Fans of this era will enjoy seeing people like Jamie Gillis and Fred J. Lincoln (who would go onto infamy for his role in Wes Craven's Last House On The Left) appear on screen alongside Sandy Fox. Valeria Marron, who appears here, would also appear in Costello's Come Fly With Us, Come And Be Purified, Joe Rock Superstar, and Honeymoon Suite among others before disappearing in the mid seventies. It's doubtful that the current nurse trend in modern porno was inspired by this trippy, nonsensical piece of filmmaking, but you never know.
Most of the scenes were shot on a soundstage - Costello confirms this on his blog though as you watch the film that much seems obvious. It's amusing to see the director play the amputee patient but he also pops up in a bizarre Groucho Marx mask at one point, standing in front of the hospital where we're supposed to believe all of this action is taking place. None of this really makes very much sense at all and it's a decidedly un-erotic sex film, but as a cultural oddity it's definitely got some replay value. You can't really say it's well made, well acted, or anything close to good but it's definitely got some train wreck appeal, you can't quite force yourself to turn away.
Video/Audio/Extras:
This fullframe transfer is sourced from a tape and as such it looks pretty soft, but at least it presents the film in its original aspect ratio. Colors are a bit on the faded side and detail is only as good as the source will allow for, but at least it's watchable enough. It's not on par with Video-X-Pix's recent restorations and DVD releases, but it'll do for now. There's a Video-X-Pix bug that appears in the bottom right corner periodically as the movie plays out.
The Dolby Digital Mono soundtrack is a little muffled and not of the best quality, but again, it's taken from a tape source so the limitations of the older technology are going to be there when that's the case. Dialogue is pretty easy to understand, however, and the background music comes through reasonably clear. There aren't a lot of sound effects used in the film, mostly just some random moaning and groaning during the action scenes and these are handled just fine, as are the talkier bits of the movie.
The disc doesn't come with a whole lot in the way of extra features but there are two trailers tucked away neatly underneath the menu screens, one for Felecia and one for Dirty Blonde. There's also a still gallery of random old school porno starlets in action, and an interview with Seka (5:19) in which she talks about the golden age of porn (which has appeared on other VXP releases) in addition to chapter selection and animated menus. The cover art is pretty cool.
The Final Word:
A sterling example of pornographic lunacy, Costello's Teenage Nurses is bat shit insane even by the admittedly bat shit insane standards of seventies NYC smut. It's wacky, it's funny, and it's definitely different.
