Nurse Girl Dorm: Sticky Fingers (1985)

Nurse Girl Dorm: Sticky Fingers is a fairly late entry in Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno series. In the early 70s all the major Japanese studios were in dire financial straits, having never recovered from the advent of television. Nikkatsu’s answer to this problem was to embrace sex. They switched over entirely to making erotic movies, a move that proved to be immensely successful and which saved the studio. Their “Roman Porno” films, made between 1971 and 1988, were incredibly varied. Some featured brutal sexual violence. Many had strong sadomasochistic leanings. But others were lighthearted goofy sex comedies. Nurse Girl Dorm: Sticky Fingers definitely fits into the latter category. It’s pure sexy fun.

It all takes place in the nurse dorm in St Elizabeth’s Hospital, somewhere in Japan. The young nurses are all of course sex-crazed.

The movie opens in typically outrageous style with a young nurse named Mayumi masturbating with a vacuum cleaner. At the crucial moment the killjoy dorm supervisor, accompanied by her bulldog, interrupts her. The bulldog is vitally necessary to keep these girls under control and to make sure he doesn’t miss anything he has a flashlight mounted on his head. Yes, this movie is going to be a crazy ride.

The dorm is in turmoil because Yuki is coming back. Inoue Yuki (Jun Izumi) is a legend at St Elizabeth’s Hospital. She left to get married but now she’s divorced and she’s back in the nurse dorm. The dorm supervisor is taking no chances. Every drop of alcohol has to be removed from the dorm. She’s going to watch Yuki like a hawk.

Yuki shares a room with Noriko. Noriko loves living in the dorm because it’s so much fun taking baths with all the other girls. Pretty soon Yuki and Noriko get down to some serious lesbo lovin’.

Apart from masturbating with vacuum cleaners the girls spend most of their time trying to sneak their boyfriends into the dorm. Yuki is horrified when she sees Mayumi tying bedsheets together to make an improvised ladder. Don’t these younger girls know anything? Yuki always keeps a rope ladder in her room, a much more effective solution.

By this time it’s obvious to the dorm supervisor (and to the viewer) that Yuki is a very bad influence on the other girls. They’re wild enough but Yuki combines wildness with cool intelligence and imagination, a dangerous combination.

Yuki’s ex-husband, a cop, shows up. He wants her back but she’s set her sights on Dr Kodama. Unfortunately Mayumi has set her sights on him as well.

It builds into a classic bedroom farce with multiple men smuggled into the dorm and a positively staggering amount of sexual activity. The dorm supervisor is too busy to deal with this situation. She’s managed to kidnap one of the men and she’s got him tied up and is giving him a good flogging. This is exactly the sort of thing she’s always dreamed of doing and she’s having a really good time. She’s a believer in discipline.

There’s plenty more kinkiness where that came from - sex in the back of a hearse, the ex-cop subjecting all the nurses to full-body searches, fun with handcuffs, etc.

The kinkiness is all played for laughs. There’s a lot of fairly steamy sex and a lot of nudity, but in fact all of it is played for laughs and it’s silly and good-natured and cheerful.

And it’s funny. Humour doesn’t always translate from one culture to another but that isn’t a problem here. This is your basic sex comedy, executed with enthusiasm and with that touch of craziness that is so very Japanese. It’s a very likeable movie.

All of the acting is good with Jun Izumi as Yuki being the standout performer as the bad girl who is really just a girl who wants to have fun and intends to do so. Yôko Ishidô is terrific as the dorm supervisor who turns out to be just as perverted as everyone else.

Impulse’s DVD offers a very good anamorphic transfer. The only extra is the liner notes by Jasper Sharp which don’t tell us much abut this particular film but do tell us plenty of interesting stuff about pink films and roman porno in general.

This is one of the lighter entries in the Roman Porno cycle. It has good-hearted craziness without disturbing weirdness and it’s sexy and amusing.

Nurse Girl Dorm: Sticky Fingers is a lot of fun. Highly recommended.