12 Hour Shift

A hospital is a great place for drama. When the stakes are literally life or death on a regular basis with real human beings on either end of care it amplifies every personal or medical challenge. It's why Grey's Anatomy is still going and why E.R. ran for so long. But those life and death stakes are also fertile ground for dark laughs...which is the direction 12 Hour Shift goes.

The Setup

The year is 1999 and our lead character is Mandy, a hospital nurse about to work a double...who's also addicted to pills and collecting organs for a black market dealer. But when her not so bright cousin botches the latest delivery, it kicks off a dangerous series of misadventures that leaves a trail of bodies and mayhem in its wake.

12 Hour Shift gets it. And by "it" I mean how to make an R-rated black comedy. The key to a great black comedy, at least by my standards, is exaggeration. That's not to say you can't underplay things for dark laughs, you absolutely can, but you need to match your story. And if your story is about botched black market organ delivery, you need to create a cartoonish world so people feel free to laugh. And 12 Hour Shift has plenty of laughs.

Angela Bettis is our emotional baseline as Mandy. Despite being a drug addicted criminal, Mandy comes across like a sane woman in an insane situation. She's constantly trying to put out fires her cousin started and coming up with relatively smart solutions. Which means the rest of the cast are all at 11s in terms of absurdity, action, and performance. Whether it's her cousin who decides to blatantly murder people to get the organs she needs, her fast-talking supervisor who's in on the whole thing, or a bumbling policeman, Mandy is trying to navigate and read each of these off the wall people at every moment.

Granted the baseline for the movie's humor is Mandy's cousin Regina. Regina is both a perfect stock character and an inversion of it. She's a perfect stock character because she looks and acts like the "dumb blonde," but her versions of dumb mistakes include...random acts of incompetent murder to get the organ she needs. It means we've got insanely violent actions happening that are all played for laughs because of how dumb the justification is. The film also keeps the violence at an arm's length. The victims of violence are rarely main characters and despite people searching corpses for organs, it never drifts into gross-out territory.

With that in place, the movie keeps the tension up by piling up the bodies and chance of discovery and death. Either the police, patients, black market dealers, or the violent criminal the police brought in are going to cause problems. All in with a frenetic joke heavy pace that blends in flourishes of bloody violence, profanity laden rants, and general absurdity.

The end result plays like a parody of "the worst day of work ever" setup and it's a lot of fun.

Verdict: Dark Fun

With a perfectly crafted tone and hilarious characters, 12 Hour Shift is a very fun dark comedy. 8/10