12 Hour Shift - Final Girls Berlin Film Festival

This is my review of 12 Hour Shift originally written for its showing at FrightFest 2020.

It’s the dead shift, the hard-ass, shift and the 12 Hour Shift. The nocturnal hours at this hospital in Arkansas sees a lucrative trade in fresh organs which have a market and a price. The problem is when you have drugged fuelled nurses supplying the goods to drug fuelled couriers, there’s bound to be a slip up. That happens when Regina (Gina) (Chloe Farnworth) packs the portable fridge with cold cans to keep the organs fresh but forgets the organs! Returning to the boss who has a client on the operating table she’s ordered back to get them, a replacement in an hour, or else.

The hospital end of the operation is co-ordinated by hard-nosed nurse Mandy (Angela Bettis) (who is on probation) and her boss Karen (Nikea Gamby-Turner). Further complicating matters is the arrival of Mandy’s half-brother Andrew having OD’d. Teetering on death Gina (who is Mandy’s cousin by marriage) suggests that he could be helped along.

No way that is going to happen so with the absolute minimum of knowledge Gina tries to pass herself of as a nurse, and find the organs for herself. Having been told that the nurses’ preferred method of euthanasia is bleach Gina proceeds to try this on a dialysis patient with the obvious result.

There is also a manacled killer (David Arquette) who escapes and runs merrily murderous around the hospital as well as a daughter with her mother who has dementia, or has she... To complicate matters even more Gina’s boss has dispatched one of his boys (Dusty Warren) to deal with the matter. Soon the concocted plan, that was never properly thought out anyway, starts to come apart at the seams.

It all looks as if it should fall apart trying too hard to be dark, funny and off the wall at the same time. It is ambitious but hangs together very well with the separate stories and characters running into each other (in particular in the final act when the escaped prisoner is running free knocking people off) do their bit then disappear.

Director Brea Grant however keeps it all together and it’s a satisfying whole with Mandy and Gina being the linchpins of what is to all intents and purposes a farce. They are excellent getting the best out of Grant’s biting script with some sharp dialogue to work with. And for a clinical setting that by rights should be cold, spick and span, the design, colours and lighting make it all look very grungy and sleazy.