Nurse Betty is a 2000 film directed by Neil La Bute, based on the story by John C. Richards.
Traumatized as a result of witnessing her husband's brutal slaying, Betty (
Renee Zellweger), a small-town waitress and
Soap Opera fan, enters a fugue state that allows - even encourages - her to keep functioning... in a state of
Alternate Reality. Now living out the fantasy life of the erstwhile Nurse Betty, she is set on returning to the love of her life, the lead character on Betty's favorite medical soap opera... the fictional Dr. Ravell. What she doesn't know is... the hitmen are after her next.
This film contains examples of:
- Cannot Tell Fiction From Reality: After Betty witnesses her husband's murder she has a brain snap and believes she's a character from her favorite soap opera.
- Hollywood Silencer: Averted, at least in one instance. When one of the hitmen goes to the other room with his silenced pistol into the adjacent room to Betty to commit suicide with the door closed, the "thump" of the gun is loud enough to make Betty jump. Ironically, this is a movie about a person that had trouble separating soap opera characters with real people.
- Holy Hitman: The hitman pair are both very religious and will cite chapter and verse when killing.
- Instant Drama, Just Add Tracheotomy: Betty successfully performs a tracheotomy, knowing how to do so from obsessively watching a medical soap opera.
- Pretty Little Headshots: Initially averted, then played straight. When Chris Rock's assassin character is shot in the forehead, it's a Pretty Little Headshot. However, a deleted scene entitled "The Flap" shows that it really was graphic at first. This was probably changed on the account of it being really gross and not fitting the mood of the scene.
- Soap Within a Show: The show is called "A Reason to Love". The DVD even includes episodes of the show in their entirety. They're only five minutes long and exist just to show clips during the movie, but there's a coherent plot running through them. Expectedly, all the soap cliches are shown in full, right down to that damn fuzzy camera.
- Trauma Induced Amnesia: Betty is stripped off any memory regarding her husband's murder.
0 reviews