HOSPITAL MASSACRE (AKA X-RAY)
It’s Valentine’s Day, and at
the Jeremy residence that means one thing; the annual Valentine’s Day toy train
races of course! Who doesn’t race trains
on Valentine’s Day? Heathens!? Susan Jeremy and her boy crush are so caught
up with gambling and rooting for the races that they don’t notice a jealous
onlooker, lurking right outside the window.
Harold longs for Susan like the desert longs for rain. He wants her to be his valentine, but when
she receives the letter she scoffs; big mistake. She goes to the kitchen to retrieve some
sweet Valentine’s Day cake for her and her boy toy, but returns to a murder
scene. Her friend is suspended in the
air, head impaled on a coat hangar, and from this point forward I knew this
movie was going to be a real treat; one filled with oodles of golden delicious
cheese just oozing from its pores. The
victim’s body is most certainly a doll, not a body cast or latex thingy, a
cheap ass doll straight from the store shelf.
They didn’t even bother adding any blood for effect, so it took me a
second to register what it was, or really what they wanted the audience to
believe it was. Another thing that kind
of gets my goat right off the bat is that this is another Valentine’s Day
slasher put out a year after My Bloody
Valentine, and the killer’s name is basically the same “Harry”. I guess the hospital setting differentiates
it from MBV, as we cool slasher kids like to call it, but I thought all the
similarities were pretty ironic.
Nineteen years later and Susan
Jeremy is a fully grown and rather voluptuous woman. A real independent 80’s kind of gal;
struggling with a divorce while trying to break the glass ceiling. It’s Valentine’s Day and she’s due for a
medical checkup following a recent promotion at work, but her fiancé Jake warns
her that strange things have been going on at the hospital. He doesn’t know the half of it. Rumors aren’t enough to slow her stride, but
she soon finds out that the hospital is indeed one whacky place. It reminded me of a hospital if it was
operated by Troma. It’s the kind of
place where mental patients walk about the halls freely, drinking booze and
smearing hamburger ketchup everywhere.
Nurses are as pushy as the Gestapo and liable to manhandle seriously ill
patients. And Heaven help you if the
doctor’s find some malignancy with your x-ray.
They won’t allow you to leave and force you to strip down for a creepy
ass checkup by Dr. Saxon, who will feel you up while staring at you with cold compassion-less eyes. I guess a general
rule at this hospital is to never tell the patient their diagnosis. Susan tries desperately to figure out why
they’re forcing her detainment with no luck.
They just won’t budge on that rule and basically act like she’s totally
bonkers for asking, same with her fiancé Jake.
Then they lock her up with a bunch of crazy senile old ladies for good
measure, who gang up on Susan and call her names. Is this Obamacare?
Meanwhile a maniac dressed in
hospital scrubs and wearing an operating mask is slaying the staff and falsifying
Susan’s medical records. He spends most of his time stalking the 9th
floor of the hospital, which has been closed to fumigate for bugs, but this
doesn’t seem to stop hospital staff from being easily lured there with
anonymous messages from the telecom speaker.
The gawking janitor gets a bubbling deep cleansing acid facial and a
nurse gets stabbed and stuffed in a closet; fairly standard stalk and slash
fare. One nurse gets wrapped in a sheet and injected with toxic sludge; she
takes a few painful steps down the hall after then succumbs to the toxins. The inclusion of the sheet seemed rather
bizarre, as well as the way she stood there screaming at the evil surgeon
running at her with an open sheet in his arms until it was too late for her to
escape. He doesn’t show the needle full
of slime until after nabbing her, so she was apparently just screaming at a man
running in her direction with a sheet wrapped in his arms like a sail, like he
was a flying squirrel ready to take flight.
Perhaps she had a phobia about flying rodents. Susan’s big bf gets bone-sawed, his
decapitated head sent to her in a valentine from the killer. The kill scenes towards the end are so back
to back it gives the impression that the sadistic surgeon is out to eliminate
the entire staff of the hospital, until it’s just him with Susan sprawled out
on an operating table.
They try to hide the true
identity of the killer by peppering the cast with off kilter characters, but
it’s fairly obvious who the blood thirsty physician really is, I mean they
don’t even change up his name much, and they make him out to be the only
character with a lick of common sense, so it’s just got to be him. Susan, helplessly strapped to the operating
table asks Harry what he wants from her.
After a dramatic pause a ghoulish grin spreads across his lips “What I
always wanted…your heart!” She
miraculously breaks free, the final chase commences, and Harry ends up taking a
swan dive off the roof of the hospital, screaming all the way down and lit on
fire. Exactly how I want to go, except
there would be a lot more laughing and less screaming. Make your death interesting, you only die
once!
Hospital Massacre (aka X-Ray)
is pretty silly, but it plays it all with a straight poker face which kind of
makes it more endearing to me. I caught
myself laughing during several scenes until I realized they were expected to be
taken seriously (then I laughed more), and the soap opera soundtrack gives it that daytime drama
feel, like it came on right after Oprah but before Judge Judy.
The whole premise of detaining a patient during a checkup and refusing
to let her leave was really wacky, but the entire story seemed to hinge on it
like the death dealing doctor couldn’t just follow her home. By the end when Susan is screaming
hysterically that the entire hospital is nuts I couldn’t help but agreed with
her. There’s
enough kills to keep the pulse from flat lining, and just enough gruel
stew to get me to come back and make another appointment with X-RAY!
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