Reanhauer (Bill Roy) leads his own small cult of followers who recently have become obsessed with the idea of returning from death, and that's down to one of their number dying, with their master stealing the corpse and placing it in the desert to be prayed over in the belief that they will resurrect him by chanting. However, Reanhauer's right hand man Stevens (J.C. Wells) is becoming increasingly sceptical about the positive effects since the deceased does not appear to be making any moves to be alive once again, and he tells him this to his face, which the man doesn't wish to hear. He returns to the body, which is now decomposing, but as he uses his will to bring it back, he collapses...
Quite what was going on here was not entirely clear, as there seems to be some cosmic forces at work when the preacher topples over, so much so that when he is taken to hospital we find out the reason this is called Nurse Sherri (though it was also known as Beyond the Living, among other titles). The woman herself, played by Jill Jacobson, is in attendance in the operating room and what do you know, she becomes possessed by the spirit of Reanhauer, or possibly whatever had inhabited his body at the point of being struck down with his attack. This state of affairs exhibited itself in, er, well not very much for a very long time, as this was Al Adamson directing and he only had half an hour of plot.
Not so good if you have a ninety minute movie and that paltry storyline, somewhere between The Exorcist and one of those crazed cult members horrors of the early seventies, failed to paper over any yawning gaps in the narrative where the actors were instructed to potter about doing nothing very much. Oh, there were subplots, the main one being the daytime soap opera shenanigans of nurse Marilyn Joi looking after a football player recently blinded in an accident (Prentiss Moulden in his only role, and we didn't even get to see his eyes in it). He comes in handy because his grandmother knew about Haitian voodoo, which when the matter of casting out demons arises is the very dab.
In the meantime, Sherri is apparently possessed twice, once in the operating room as Reanhauer has some magic powers to be faced with, and once when she is in bed relaxing and her bedroom is invaded by some of the cheapest special effects known to mankind. Or womankind, as she accommodatingly opens her legs to receive, er, well remember the children's book Mister Messy? Imagine a green version of him, basically the effects department, assuming there was such a thing, took a pen and scribbled on a bit of paper, then superimposed that over the hapless Jacobson, though there were also a couple of glowing-eyed silhouettes for her to contend with, similarly amateurish in their conception. Once all that is over, you would have a long wait for anything like a payoff.
What happens in horror movies when someone becomes possessed? That's correct, they start trying to kill people, and the demon has it in mind to bump off everyone who was in that operating room, as well as anyone who might be a threat, such as the football player (who has a bracelet that wards off evil, so not at a complete disadvantage). Joi and co-star Katherine Pass must team up and track down the corpse to incinerate it and lift the curse, leading to a lot of messing about in the torchlit dark of a graveyard, though we have already seen Joi supply the gratuitous topless scene when she strips off to admire her form in the mirror, bringing new meaning to the word "perfunctory" and Pass has to play a scene where she calms down a patient by taking off all her clothes (not that we see anything) and performing oral sex on the old geezer; you think she's possessed too, but actually she's simply a weirdo. As one of Adamson's best known efforts, certainly widest distributed, Nurse Sherri gave everyone who saw it an impression of his oeuvre, and that wasn't good, not at all.
Prolific American director of chaotic exploitation movies, who directed some 30 films between 1961 and 1983. The titles of his films were often the best thing about them, but the likes of Satan's Sadists, Dracula vs Frankenstein and I Spit on your Corpse are popular amongst bad movie buffs. In a nasty end worthy of one of his films, Adamson was murdered in 1995, his body found buried under his freshly tiled bathroom.
