by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched the latest “premiere” on Lifetime, a movie from
Sunshine Films (apparently, according to imdb.com, there are several companies
called “Sunshine Films” and this one is based in Florida, though the only
giveaway that the film was shot there was several stunning shots of sunsets
over a swampy river with a bridge in the foreground) and our old friends at
Marvista Entertainment. The film was originally shot under the title Night
Nurse, which is how imdb.com lists it (and
which evokes comparison to the marvelous film Night Nurse which William Wellman directed at Warners in 1931,
with Barbara Stanwyck as the titular character and Clark Gable as a gangster
for whom a single mom neglects her kid — in the film’s most amazing scene
Stanwyck knocks her down and, as she’s lying on the ground, says, “You — mother!”), but Lifetime aired it under the more Lifetime-y
title Killer Night Shift. The
film opens at Milton General Hospital — well, it really opens with a scene in which a shadowy figure has
tied up a woman and is holding a scalpel menacingly against her abdomen, but
that’s just a prologue and surprisingly it isn’t followed by one of Lifetime’s
usual chyrons stating that we’ve moved x days/months/years earlier or y days/months/years later. We see a visibly pregnant (though her swollen
belly is a pretty obvious fake) woman named Patricia Rosen (Christie Burson)
leadng a class in an online video called “Yoga Time with Trish.” She’s
expecting the birth of her daughter — that’s right, she and her husband David
(the not unattractive Johnny Pacar, who’s better-looking than the average run
of actors playing the “good” husbands in Lifetime movies even though I wish he
didn’t have such a scrawny ass) have not only done the sonogram tests to find
out that their baby will be a girl, they’ve even given her a name, “Hope” — and
is treating her online audience to a special series of exercises especially
suitable for pregnant women. Meanwhile, a blonde nurse named Irene (Vanessa
Reseland) with a really bad
attitude has just got herself suspended from her job at Milton General for one
week because on at least three occasions, inventory from Milton’s drug stash
disappeared and she was the only one who could have taken it. Desperate for
work, she accepts an assignment as Patricia’s in-home caregiver after two other
things happen: Tricia (as she’s called throughout the movie) is diagnosed with
“placenta previa,” in which a bit of the placenta descends over the cervix and
causes higher-than-normal bleeding; usually it means the baby will have to be
born with a Cesarean section but Tricia’s doctor tells her that won’t be
necessary in her case, but she will need bed rest and shouldn’t do things like
climb up and down stairs. The other thing is that her husband David (ya
remember her husband David?) is summoned away on a two-week business trip to
Scotland, though since her due date is three weeks hence he’s confident that
he’ll be able to get back before their baby is born.
David inadvertently drinks
her “ginger pregnancy tea” and therefore Tricia has to go to a drugstore, where
she meets a really nice maternity nurse named Katy Lyle (Cynthia Evans), who
suggests raspberry lime tea as an alternative and mentions that she’s Tricia’s
neighbor as well as a professional nurse who can help her. For an act or so it
looks like Katy will be the nice nurse who protects Tricia from the evil nurse
Irene, whose take-charge attitude puts Tricia off her from the start, but
within a commercial break or two directors Damién Romay and Ernesto Rowe and writers
Jo Hannah Afton and Tom Freyer start dropping hints that they’re going to pull
a reversal on us and Katy will be the mean nurse from whom Irene will have to
protect Tricia as best we can. We get a long sequence in which an unseen figure
sneaks into Tricia’s bedroom when she’s asleep and leaves a drug amongst all
her other drugs — the new drug is something she was on before but which is
contraindicated in a pregnant woman (for those of you not up on basic medspeak
“contraindicated” merely means “you shouldn’t take it”) — and then a series of
increasingly bitter and nasty confrontations between Katy and Irene over Tricia
that ends with Tricia learning the hospital suspended Irene for stealing drugs
and firing Irene so Katy can look after her alone. Only this turns out to be a bad move. as Katy herself gets more tyrannical and
Tricia begins to wonder if she’s leaped from the frying pan into the fire. On
her way out the door on what’s supposed to be her last day Irene stumbles upon
Katy’s wallet, which reveals that her real name is Rachel Daumler, and her nursing license was actually revoked
the year before was patient abuse. I was hoping writers Afton and Freyer would
allow Irene to redeem herself by being the instrument by which Tricia was
rescued from Katy’s clutches, but no-o-o-o-o: though Irene manages to convince the Black woman
who sent her out to Tricia’s in the first place to believe her, everyone else
at the hospital is still convinced Irene is a maniac and Katy a godsend. So is
Tricia herself, especially when Katy picks up a drug bottle containing a
forbidden substance from the table on which Tricia keeps her meds and claims
Irene left it there.
We’re pretty sure by this point that Katy did it herself —
that she was the shadowy figure
we saw with her back to the camera adjusting Tricia’s meds — and as things
turned out I have seen enough Lifetime movies before I not only guessed Katy as
the killer night-shift nurse but even guessed her motive: back in college Katy
had dated Tricia’s husband David (once again, ya remember Tricia’s
husband David?) and he had got her
pregnant, but she’d had a miscarriage and the complications from that left her
unable to conceive again — actually there was an odd explanation that said she
could conceive but her womb would be too screwed up actually to carry a
pregnancy to term — so she nursed her grievance and got more and more
frustrated by helping other women deliver babies while she could not do so
herself until she learned David had got his wife pregnant and she determined to
insinuate herself into Tricia’s life and steal “her” baby. Along the way Katy
clubs Irene to death after Irene discovers her true identity and threatens to
call the police on her — once again a stupid movie whistleblower gets herself
killed by telling the victim
she’s going to report her to the police instead of walking away quietly and
then doing so — and in the film’s most macabre scene Katy disposes of the body
by spending an entire afternoon digging a grave where Tricia had wanted to
plant tulips. (We know it takes an entire afternoon because there’s a cool
time-lapse shot of Katy doing this, starting when it’s still full daylight and
finishing at twilight.) Fortunately she’s witnessed doing so by two neighbor
kids in an adjoining house. The climax occurs at Tricia’s home — which once
belonged to David’s grandmother, which explains all the retro furnishings and
also that toys David played with as a kid are still there and they’re cleaning
them to get them ready for Hope — when Katy ties Tricia to a bed and forces her
to give birth au naturel. David
arrives since he’s left his business trip early to be with his wife when she
delivers, but he also gets caught in Katy’s web and there’s a touch-and-go
scene between the three in which Katy puts David under with an injection, then
tells Tricia she’s just put an anticoagulant in her IV so she’ll bleed to death
while Katy gets away with little baby Hope.
Nonetheless, displaying a high
level of strength for someone who’s been through a birth and is now under the
influence of a drug designed to make her bleed uncontrollably, Tricia manages
to extricate herself from her bondage, confront Katy and finally stab her with
Katy’s scalpel, following which there’s a tag scene six months later (this time
Lifetime does supply us with a
chyron to give us the time jump) with David, Tricia and little Hope as one big
happy family, though it’s not clear just how they got rescued when, as Charles
pointed out, David and Tricia both
were in need of major medical attention and it’s not completely clear that Katy
is dead. I had hoped Irene would live to the end of the movie, redeem herself
as a character and actually be the Seventh Cavalry-style instrument of Tricia’s
rescue, but no-o-o-o-o, writers
Afton and Freyer went for the more common Lifetime trope of killing her off
instead. Killer Night Shift,
despite that tacky title (one would have thought it would have been about a
woman forced to work late who encounters a stalker during those night shifts
who proceeds to make her life miserable), is actually one of Lifetime’s better
movies, with at least some
pretense at character development — there’s a tearful confession scene in which
Irene confesses that she stole drugs from work but only to give to her sick mother, who needed them and had
no health insurance, and we wonder what’s going to happen to this unseen
character once Irene is out of the picture — and better than average direction
from Romay and Rowe (they’re listed as co-directors but Romay’s credit is in
larger type than Rowe’s). It’s just that Lifetime’s formulae have become so
established one wonders if the guides for their writers are literally set in
stone, and it was all too easy for me to guess not only who the real villain
was but also What Made Katy Run.
