The Sly, Underrated Greatness of Roger Corman's Night Call Nurses

The Film: Night Call Nurses (1972), available on DVD in the new set Roger Corman's Cult Classics: The Nurses Collection via Shout! Factory.

Why it's an Inessential Essential: The respectability gap between director Jonathan Kaplan's recent and early-career work is pretty striking. Today, Kaplan works primarily in TV: He served as a co-executive producer for both E.R. and Without a Trace, and has also directed eight episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, two episodes of Brothers and Sisters and 40 episodes of E.R. But when Kaplan started his filmmaking career, he made sleazy but surprisingly sturdy exploitation pics like Truck Turner (1974), in which Isaac Hayes plays a bounty hunter that is very attached to beer and his cat, and The Slams (1973), a prison flick starring Jim Brown. Now Night Call Nurses, Kaplan's 1972 directorial debut, has just been reissued in a new collection highlighting four nursesploitation pics produced by schlockmeister Roger Corman. Kaplan's film is easily the best one in the set — and also a good indicator of Kaplan's then-nascent talent.
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