WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Nurses for Sale (1976)

This is one of the many movies in which Independent-International used comic book artist Gray Morrow to do the art for the posters. He also did the poster and sales art for Brain of BloodCinderella 2000Dracula vs. FrankensteinNurse SherriFive Bloody GravesBlazing Stewardesses and Dynamite Brothers.

This film, produced by Sam Sherman and remixed by Al Adamson, was once Captain Roughneck from St. Pauli, directed and written by Rolf Olsen. In that movie, Captain Jolly (Curd Jürgens) and his men have been hired to smuggle a vaccine within a shipment of booze. When government officials try to take that booze from him, he destroys it, and the vaccine gets stolen, which gets him blamed for taking it. There are also some nurses — they had to come in somewhere — kidnapped in the jungle.

It’s a little over an hour long, and the new material from Adamson has some of the nurses making out. One of them is Swedish model Lenka Novak, who also appeared in Moonshine County ExpressCoachThe Great American Girl Robbery and Vampire Hookers and was one of the Catholic high school girls in trouble in The Kentucky Fried Movie.

The movie often feels like two different films fighting for screen time: a gritty German smuggling drama and a 1970s American sexploitation romp. That’s because that’s exactly what’s happening on screen. And it’s a bit of a shock to see Jürgens in an Al Adamson-edited mess. Jürgens was a genuine international star, famous for playing the villain Karl Stromberg in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.

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