Census Bloodbath: Hello, nurse

VISITING HOURS

It's Halloween again, and for our 12th annual Switcheroo with Brennan Klein of Popcorn Culture, we're doing what we always do this time of year when we turn the tables on one another: he takes over my Cardboard Science feature and reviews some of those corny mid-century sci-fi movies, and I do some fieldwork for Brennan's Census Bloodbath, as he gives me a slate of sick 80s slasher flicks from his ever-expanding encyclopedia of death.  This year we're back to full power, with three psyche-scarring films of Brennan's selection.

1982

Directed by Jean-Claude Lord

Written by Brian Taggert

Spoilers: moderate

The overt unifying theme of the slasher flicks Brennan chose this year, and I know this because he told me so, is simply that they're Canadian, but the secret theme I've accidentally developed with them is that, across all three, I'll have spent a first paragraph (or so) either explicitly or implicitly questioning whether they're even a slasher film at all, and while Superstition and The Carpenter have content and concepts that pull them pretty far outside of the classical slasher set-up, they obviously don't exist in the form they do without slasher movies informing them at pretty much every step of the way.  Our final film of this year's crossover, Visiting Hours, sure looks more like a classical slasher than either of them, and it came out in the first half of 1982, just past the heyday of the subgenre and self-evidently exploiting its boom, but Visiting Hours could easily be imagined existing in the exact form it does without, for instance, Halloween having been made (or, for that matter, and amazingly enough, Halloween II), and hence without the whole slasher movement that Halloween birthed existing around it, to the point that you might well have an easier time imagining Visiting Hours if slasher films hadn't existed yet, and imagined that it came out in the first half of 1978 instead; basically, I'm not sure it can be a slasher movie when one could mount a pretty persuasive argument it's not even a horror movie.  It's the kind of movie that they made reasonably frequently in the 1970s, and it's what turned into slashers, thrillers regarding angry men who, as both consequence and cause, took advantage of the dissolution of urban society to hurt the women they'd decided to blame whilst a still-patriarchal world demonstrated its traditional ineptitude in stopping them, in part because that reflects something true and in part because thrillers need to last about 90 minutes, and typically need to continually escalating the threat.  In Visiting Hours it fancies itself speaking to the former, even if, pretty soon, it becomes obvious it's the latter, though in this case, it lasts 105 minutes.  You can tell the movie mightn't denigrate itself as a slasher: that runtime is a giveaway, and the startlingly legitimate cast, headlined by an Oscar winner and multiple nominee, who was furthermore in her 50s, is certainly another, as is the body count, and, more than the body count, the fact that in most of what would otherwise be kill scenes, the victim actually survives.

Anyway, the 70s are busting out all over in Visiting Hours, and not just in its sociologically-grounded story, nor even in its aesthetics (its photography sounds more in "70s naturalism" than in "80s neo-expressionist nightmare," such as would describe nearly any contemporary horror movie with even half of this one's $6 million budget; it does mean some good-and-scuzzy-looking urban nights).  It's also in its content, which drifts towards sleaze rather than violence (and, on that count, sleaze that it thinks is classier and more restrained than it is).  I suppose it would be hard to let it slip off the slasher list when, after all, it made the NVALA and BBFC's "video nasty" list, though it says something about it as "a slasher" when I know exactly why it was initially prosecuted in Britain, that is, I know exactly which minute got cut to get it certified for release, and I don't even have to look up what that minute was, because there's literally nothing else it can be besides a scene of sexualized torture (very specifically, a panty-clad crotch and a switchblade both occupying the same frame), though even here, it's sexualized torture that does not end in a murder.  What I'm saying is, it's not a movie that conceives of "special makeup effects" as an art in its own right; the movie could have been made in its essentials in the late 60s.

Now, don't get me wrong: that is no inherently bad thing; but it does mean, unfortunately, that Visiting Hours asks to be judged, not by the standards of, say, Friday the 13th Part III—which aren't actually lower, as such, but they're obviously different—but by the standards it sets for itself, as a thriller, and Brian Taggert's screenplay is going to build up a whole bunch of weird and weirdly-unnecessary obstacles for itself that mean it ultimately can't navigate its way to a satisfactory ending (or a satisfactory second half, if not slightly more), while director Jean-Claude Lord is going to exhaust his ability to construct really exciting setpieces by the end of the prologue.

Still, as that implies, Visiting Hours starts off quite good, and it lets you know it has its heart in somewhere like the right place from the get-go, since while I'd probably aver that the slasher genre as a whole winds up with some measure of feminist tilt if only by accident, just by virtue having female protagonists fighting sex murderers, Taggert's screenplay lays it on the line upfront and textually.  So, in Boston (this is yet another Canadian slasher that pretends it's in America, for absolutely no reason), we kick off with newswoman Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant, that Oscar winner I mentioned) owning the smarmiest-imaginable prosecuting attorney for the way he's railroaded a woman for murder despite fairly overwhelming evidence that when she killed her husband, she did so in self-defense.  This exasperates her producer and friend Gary Baylor (William Shatner, arguably the biggest contemporary star in the movie, and in the secondary cast at most), who understands Deborah's point of view but is inevitably a tool of the bosses, and she cuts the argument he'd prefer to have short by storming off and walking home.  Shortly, she arrives, in her car (outside of anything designated "a sequence," this movie can have some whiffy editing; that sexualized torture scene sure looks like it's cutting simply to avoid luxuriating further in the rape and the murder, without any indication that its victim did, in fact, get out scathed but alive, but nevertheless she just pops up without fanfare in a subsequent scene as if that information had been provided to us).  Deborah enters her house, and scowls at the mess her housekeeper has failed to clean up, but otherwise kicks off her shoes and gets ready for bed.  Unfortunately, what's really transpired is that her housekeeper is no more, and that, during that fateful interview, even when it didn't air, it still had an audience in the form of her stalker, Colt Hawker (Michael Ironside, so I still wasn't kidding about the cast), a maniac misogynist who, incensed by Deborah's stand for women, has decided to graduate to full-on political assassination.  Having made himself at home, he chases her through the house in some kind of gender-bending presentation that is very, very hard to square with, like, anything else going on in this movie, even including his sex criminal M.O. such as we see it, but Psycho is hard to shake off even twenty-two years later, I suppose, and it is a pretty fine piece of thrillmaking, perhaps the best scene in the movie, amping the tension of a clear presence in the house that Deborah believes is someone friendly while the fact we're watching a thriller primes us to suspect it's very much not, and cleverly exploiting the geography of that house and a laundry elevator that looks like a safe improvised panic room until, of course, it isn't.

Deborah survives more thanks to luck than anything else, and much the worse for wear, with bad cuts and worse broken bones, and wakes up in the hospital, where nurse Sheila Monroe (Linda Purl) intends to keep her safe from all harm, and, along with Dan, and everybody, does a very bad job of it, though only Sheila's interventions draw the direct ire of Colt—it may be as much a matter of overhearing her badmouth Deborah's still-anonymous killer, and he truly is that petty—but in any case, he has simply followed his quarry to the hospital, and intends on finishing her, tonight.

Several days later, we actually get a climax to this drama, and this is one of those big film-hobbling obstacles in the screenplay that I talked about, that is simultaneously the easiest to understand how it happened and probably the most fundamental reason the plot gets caught in a chain of time-killing side-quests, and outright fuck-ups, from which it never recovers.  I'm not sure exactly which manifestation does the most damage, but as "time-killing side-quests" would probably be otherwise survivable, let's take them in ascending order of seriousness.  It does mean that this is one awfully scattered movie, narratively, and its solution to the problem of "Deborah's an invalid, which is why she has to spend most of a week in a hospital," means elevating Sheila to deuteragonist status, if not to full-on protagonist, in Deborah's stead, which actually sounds like a reasonable and even good idea except they aren't actually teaming up to fight this representation of violent patriarchy, or even interacting very much and certainly not hatching a joint scheme to catch the killer, or defend their position against him.  Hell, come down to it, we're going to find Sheila actively operating at cross-purposes to Deborah's safety, though mainly just because she and everyone else are going to be required to be pitifully stupid in order for the plot to keep happening.

In the meantime, our killer has been obliged to go back home cranky after murdering the occupant of Deborah's previous room (Dora Dainton), plus (in what I guess amounts to a weak sop to an increasingly-antsy Johnny Slasherfan) the most annoying of Sheila's fellow nurses, though in her defense she's the only figure in the film who feels like "a slasher character" (Debra Kirshenbaum).  Accordingly, we actually spend as much time with this inchoate avatar of male rage as, probably, anyone else, though not, as in the usual case, with stalking and killing.  We get a little of that, though it's not stalking—in point of fact, he inveigles Lisa (Lenore Zann), that sex torture victim, back to his place with what appears to be vampiric hypnotism or just, I guess, his Ironsidey good looks—but mainly we get flashbacks to childhood memories of a father who loved him (I think: they forgot to direct the kid playing young Colt not to laugh and smile if the intent was otherwise, but his dad's play style was still modestly concerning) but who abused his mother and got a facefull of boiling oil in retaliation.  It's almost charming and quaint, this remnant of a Great Society kind of empathy that takes as axiomatic that our killer had to be trained by a cycle of abuse, then shattered by traumatic horror, to become a woman-killer, rather than just turning out that way for no really articulable reason, or because, for example, they said something unpleasant and accurate about Charlie Kirk so, naturally, he ran them over with his car.  (We've certainly advanced as a society: now everyone gets to be Deborah!)  This isn't a reasonable criticism of Visiting Hours, but I initially thought it was a Blow Out riff, Colt being the killer hired by Deborah's political enemies to silence her and his employers getting way more misogynistic madness than they bargained for.  In compensation, we get instead a great deal of Colt basically working at the hospital in his various attempts at re-infiltrating it, scenes that can be suspenseful, and often are about as interesting as watching any other orderly do his job.  In Sheila's meantime, we meet her kids (if I may pick on the editing again, they're presented in such a way that I was surprised by Sheila's lesbian wife here in 1982, who is only belatedly clarified to be the kids' babysitter (Tali Fischer)), and we follow her around to the free clinic, whereupon she runs into Lisa, which, I'm sorry, would be mildly unacceptable as a contrivance in any case, but in this one feels like Taggert forgot what was even happening in his script, and thought he still needed to tie Sheila into the plot.

It's all suboptimal, but I get it: it does strike me as kind of difficult to write a realtime killer-thriller set in a hospital.  It strikes me as difficult even though the previous year provided a sterling example of exactly that thing, in Halloween II, but that's not a fair comparison, with Halloween II cheating a great deal with this dreamlike idea of a haunted hospital that was emptied out and virtually post-apocalyptic, whereas Visiting Hours very much has to deal with a fully-functioning institution (which means I guess some credit is due Lord and the production, because they do fill their Montreal hospital; though by the end, of course, it might as well be empty, but in better circumstances this veer into anti-realism would've felt earned).  And hence Colt continually coming back to the hospital, and surprisingly large stretches of screentime devoid of threat or the possibility of threat, resulting in a pretty slack killer-thriller that then gets up and over-padded with "psychology" and "character" beats that only somewhat work when it's Grant and Shatner, and not with anybody else.  (Ironside is a solid evocation of remorseless, implacable evil as a matter of performance, but hardly "a character," while too crippled with feet of clay and obvious bad judgment to be that scary of a villain.)  I say it's difficult, but, you know, it feel like it probably ought to have occurred to anyone to just... make Colt an actual hospital employee, and while the movie doesn't have to be a mystery to us, it could be a mystery to Colt's victims.  The really mortal wound, however, is just how hard it is to take seriously basically as soon as Colt's nighttime campaign of hospital vengeance starts in earnest.  That sop to Slasherfan is actually a problem: Colt makes it real, real obvious that the old lady in what had just been Deborah's room has been murdered, then to abscond without a witness he kills somebody else, thus giving away to anybody with two functioning neurons that Deborah's attempted assassin has undoubtedly come to finish the job.  Well, the correct procedure, it turns out, is not only concealing this from Deborah and making her think everyone thinks she's crazy, but to genuinely chalk it up to coincidence, I presume because people in Montreal just get murdered in hospitals all the time.

It sort of works itself out for a finale, though it has to race over hill and dale because it's never managed to actually braid Sheila and Deborah into a unit together, and in the process it has to present its medical professional deuteragonist as so overcome with hysteria that she can't, like, talk or even scream pertinent facts to the small army of cops now at the hospital (or just call regular emergency services on her own), but Deborah gets a cool sequence that, still, gets immediately freighted with themes the movie thinks it's taken on but hasn't.  (Deborah, during her post-assassination attempt presser is importunely asked if this changes her position on "non-violence" as, like, a political strategy—and I guess maybe she said something to this effect on her show years before this movie started, but her most clearly-defined position inside the movie is being stridently pro-self-defense—and the film at this juncture is at least somewhat treating this as the category error it is, and thus one of the dumbest fucking questions anybody has ever asked another human being, but by the end, it honestly seems to have gotten it into its head that that's what it's actually about.)  It is not, anyhow, a total failure, and despite some dull stretches, it will kick back in with something brutely cinematically interesting, though it's never delivered on a high enough level of craft to even momentarily forget that it's been dumb longer than it's been smart, and depriving its female characters of wits and agency in the context of an explicitly feminist film for more-or-less exactly that long.

Killer: Colt Hawker

Final Girl: Deborah, surprisingly

Best Kill: Colt forgets what he was here for to cut the old woman's breathing tube so he can take pictures of her while she dies

Sign of the Times: Nurses and doctors dress to suit their status instead of less professionally than a McDonald's clerk

Scariest Moment: The dab of blood the switchblade leaves on Lisa's skin as Colt strokes her body with it, very gross

Weirdest Moment: Just the reams of B-roll involving Colt driving a floor cleaner around the lobby and corridors like the floor cleaner is going to be particularly important, like he'd at least run somebody over with it

Champion Dialogue: "He actually cries in bed.  Don't ask me why.  I turned down the lights, and we started to make love, and he starts whimpering.  It's crazy.  He's an obstetrician."

Body Count: 7, though it feels like less

1. Francine, Deborah's housekeeper, killed offscreen before she gets home

2. The old lady, Mrs. Corrigan, is asphyxiated

3. Connie, a nurse, gets stabbed

4. Vinnie (Harvey Atkin), a patient, is gagged with Colt's stress ball and stabbed

5. Some cop, thrown through a window

6. Some other cop, bludgeoned

TL;DR: More Someone's Watching Me! than Halloween, though that still overestimates it; or "what would a contemporary Brian De Palma pseudo-slasher look like without Brian De Palma?"

Score: 5/10

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)

2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)

2022: Tarantula (1957) The Amaizing Colossal Man (1957) Journey To the Center of the Earth (1959)

2023: Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957)

2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)

2025: X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes (1963) Earth vs. the Spider (1958)  The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

2022: Hell Night (1981) Return to Horror High (1987) Cutting Class (1989)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)

2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)

2025: Visiting Hours (1982) Superstition (1982) The Carpenter (1988)