VISITING HOURS (1982)

VISITING HOURS (1982)

Tagline: In this hospital, your next visit may be your last.

(Horror, Thriller, Journalistic Integrity) [R]

Don't leave me. He's here. I know it!

In this one news reporter Deborah Ballin openly discusses trying to get Janet Macklyn out of jail after she kills her husband out of self-defense. Ballin believes that with a better lawyer Janet would be free. This triggers Colt Hawker who decides to take extreme measures against her after seeing his own father burned badly by his mother as a child. After unsuccessfully trying to kill Ballin, he turns his murderous anger towards other patients at Country General Hospital, friends of Ballin and Ballin herself. 

First off, this movie’s main actor is Michael Ironside (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET) who is an extremely diverse actor who can play both the creepiest darkest characters and gruff unapologetic good guy types. It is not likely you will be able to watch movies very long without having an Ironside experience (he is creeping up on 280 productions). He plays Colt Hawker in this and it’s definitely one of his more creepy roles. 

We also get a small dose of William Shatner who plays Gary Baylor and does about as little as he possibly can to help this plot along. Quite frankly, this is a film that would go on Shatner's long list of movies where he’s basically just mailing it in. We get a decent performance out of Lee Grant who plays Deborah Ballin, but I really didn’t like her character in this. Lee is probably most famous for MULHOLLAND DRIVE. The only character I did like was Sheila Munroe played by Linda Purl (MIGHTY JOE YOUNG) who does a pretty solid job in this. 

The movie is considered to be a Canuxploitation film which is a genre of B-movies made in Canada to take advantage of tax incentives mostly made in the 70s and 80s. It also has some controversial scenes that caused a lot of issues when the movie came out. I can see why, but by today’s standards, most people that watch horror wouldn’t bat an eye. Some sequences though, make you probably not want to ever leave your kids with Michael Ironside. A lot like HALLOWEEN II, a lot of this movie takes place in a hospital, but we are taken out of that setting in a lot of scenes as well. This thing also goes out of its way to give you flashbacks to show you why Colt is so messed up, but I never really felt any sympathy for him at all. 

The music is kind of lifted from the HALLOWEEN II score and was meant to and the atmospherics do a good job of trying to bring you into this terrifying world. Having said all that, this movie fails in pacing and trying to get some sort of anti-violence message across while presenting violence as the only solution. In this sense, the movie is uneven and at many times just pretty boring. If you read my stuff a lot you know I like very heavy layers of cheese with the majority of my horror films and don’t really like psychological realism in these types of flicks. 

For those reasons, I have to give this one a 2 out of 7. It’s not something I’d ever watch again even with the big names involved. It just didn’t do anything for me and could have been shortened to 15 minutes and still given the same effect.
 

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