Visiting Hours (1982) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 11

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Visiting hours are 9 to 5 and if I show up at ten past 6, well I already know that you’d find some way to sneak me in.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Michael Ironside plays a villain! Hard to believe it, but in Visiting Hours he is a misogynistic killer bent on teaching those yappy ladies a lesson.

Before Viewing

This short trailer, presumably from a television commercial, doesn’t give a lot to go on. But it’s enough. A killer is stalking people at a hospital, which include Lee Grant, Linda Purl, and William Shatner. What more needs to be said? Visiting Hours are now open.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant) is a feminist talk show host discussing the case of Janet Macklyn, a victim of spousal abuse who defended herself against her husband. Macklyn was found guilty in court of assault, and Ballin is making a big deal about the case to drum up awareness. Her producer, Gary Baylor (William Shatner), says that he can’t air the interview. Elsewhere a man, Colt Hawker (Michael Ironside) becomes agitated seeing the interview and pulls the television cord out of the wall. Later, at her house, Deborah is attacked by Colt who slashes at her with a knife. She screams for help to her neighbors. Crawling away from his attack, she is confronted by another man in the house–who is presumably someone here to help. She is taken to County General Hospital.

At the hospital, Nurse Sheila Munroe (Linda Purl) becomes protective of Deborah. Colt sneaks back into the hospital as a flower delivery man and heads for Deborah’s room, 931. However, Deborah has been moved by Sheila since Mrs Corrigan (Dora Dainton) needed some special equipment in that room. Colt finds the older woman and kills her instead, taking photos of her death for his amusement. Nurse Connie (Deborah Kirshenbaum) discovers the body and is also killed by Colt. Sheila finds Connie before she leaves for the night. Colt follows Sheila’s car so he knows where she lives.

Colt watches Sheila pickup toys in the yard, but attempts nothing further. He goes to a diner and picks up a blonde woman, Lisa (Lenore Zann). They go back to his apartment where he assaults her and tries to rape her. His issues with women stem from a moment in his childhood, shown throughout the film in flashbacks, where his mother threw hot oil on his father’s face after he beat her. He blames his mother, now deceased, for his father’s disfiguration. Deborah is back in the hospital for a surgery stemming from her attack. Having heard of the death of the woman in 931, she knows the killer is coming back for her. She becomes increasingly paranoid, but with good reason. Gary ignores her hysteria.

Colt sneaks into the hospital again, this time dressed as an orderly to avoid the heavy police presence surrounding the building. Deborah thinks that one of the medical assistants in her surgery may be the killer, but she wakes up and everything is fine. Instead, Colt is staking out Sheila’s house again. Meanwhile, Gary provides medical advice to Deborah and tells her to stay in the hospital. Lisa visits a medical clinic where Sheila works in her off hours and mentions the psycho who beat her up. In retribution, Lisa and some male friends of hers trashed Colt’s apartment where they found photos of Deborah on the walls. Sheila tells Lisa to get the photos up to Deborah’s room and tell Gary about the killer.

Sheila races home after a call that Colt made from her home. She finds her daughter and babysitter safe, but when she tries to call the police at the hospital, Colt jumps out from under a table and stabs her. Sheila is taken to the hospital, and is scheduled for x-rays in the basement. Back at his apartment, Colt takes a number of pain pills and then smashes his arm into a broken bottle, knowing that he can gain admittance to the hospital as a patient. After he gets bandaged up, he sneaks into Deborah’s room and chases her. She manages to force him to drop his switchblade by hitting him with her shoe.

Deborah takes the elevator into the basement to avoid Colt, but discovers Sheila is waiting for x-rays. Deborah decides to lead Colt away from Sheila, telling the nurse to call the police. Colt follows her even though he’s injured and drugged. He only can think of finishing her off. Hiding behind a curtain, Deborah stabs Colt with his own knife and leaves him to die. He grabs for her, but is too weak and dies. Sheila gets her x-rays, and Gary finds and comforts Deborah.

“Ms. Ballin’s position remains the same. Self-defense is our only protection against violence, but self-defense doesn’t mean one is pro-violence.” – TV Reporter

As you might be able to tell from the write-up above, Visiting Hours is a disjointed mess of a film. It is the next film on 31 Days of Horror this week that is celebrating an anniversary. Visiting Hours celebrates its 40th Anniversary this year, but the celebration will be short lived. It does share a number of elements with yesterday’s film, Frenzy. They are both about serial killers who assault and rape (or attempt to rape) their female victims. However, Frenzy was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, a man who had been making suspense films for decades, while Visiting Hours appears to have been cobbled together without thought. It has the ability to have some suspense, and does attempt to utilize various horror tropes such as the POV shot, tight framing of characters to give a sense of anxiety, and the lingering camera to suggest danger. But the editing and pacing of the film end up being boring and predictable. Definitely not what the doctor ordered..

Ironside comes off as an intense person on screen, which is why his career as a villainous or intense individual would continue  in films like Top Gun, Total Recall and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. There’s really nothing wrong with his performance. He creates a tortured soul that has a number of problems that he should be working with a therapist on, instead of taking matters into his own hands. The film’s flaws instead are part of the overall plot and actions of the characters. Some of these issues are big, like the constant jumping back and forth between Colt’s dealings and Deborah’s time in the hospital. The film sets up a tense-ish moment, only to fake the audience out by having it be nothing, with the killer being somewhere else. There’s no consistency between Colt continually coming back to attack Deborah and his distracting other “missions” against Lisa or Sheila. The strongest moment is still Deborah’s initial attack, and nothing else seems to get close to that.

There are other strange inconsistencies in the film that just distract and cause confusion. Initially, Gary tells Deborah that he can’t put her interview with the lawyer on the air. But the film cut away during the interview to show it playing on Colt’s TV. It seems like a live broadcast, so what does that all mean? Gary himself is a wasted character. Casting William Shatner means they need to find things for him to do, but his character serves no purpose except to counsel Deborah to stay in the hospital. He actually gives her medical advice at one point. Solid writing for a TV Producer, right?. Sheila is also shown with two kids, a boy and a girl. She’s supposed to take them to her ex-husband’s, but during that scene the girl says she’s sick and doesn’t want to go. The boy is never seen again, so it’s assumed he left for his Dad’s, but it’s also a lame way to keep the daughter (and the female babysitter) in harm’s way for when Colt comes to Sheila’s house.

So if the tension and suspense is non-existent in the film, what is there to recommend it? Interestingly, Visiting Hours has strong themes of female empowerment. Not that this is completely unheard of, but in a 1982 horror film this level of feminism is unexpected, especially when written and directed by men. There’s the sub-plot of Janet Macklyn’s conviction for her self defense, an element mirrored in Deborah’s own acts at the end of the film. Lisa also becomes a stronger character after her victimization. She mentions to Sheila that Colt tried to rape her but could not, so he just beat her. She then takes a modicum of revenge by trashing his apartment. Lisa also brings the name of the killer to Sheila (and the police’s) attention, making her stand up for herself, and other women in the film. Though this ends up being a bit heavy handed in the end. It’s not a subtle theme, and is often contrasted with the overt and continued violence towards women that the film depicts. It’s almost like it wants to be a post-modern feminist film–showing women standing up for themselves. But at the same time, it continues to show the brutal violence that one troubled individual causes against these women. Colt’s misogyny is also an interesting element, since it mirrors a number of current social issues today of adult man-babies being unable to accept successful or powerful women. His inability to get over his childhood trauma leads him to lash out impotently (both figuratively and literally) at the women in the movie.

Visiting Hours seemed like a slasher film with much potential. The idea of having a killer invade a hospital and stalk one or multiple characters seems like a no-brainer. In a post-Halloween timeframe, when films were being made about all kinds of serial killers in different locations (Prom Night, Terror Train, The Funhouse), there seems like so much potential. The poster campaign is also clever, utilizing the lit windows of the hospital to form the shape of a skull, and turning the “R” in Hours into the prescription symbol (Rx). But these clever marketing ideas can’t help out a film that is fundamentally flawed and lacks the basic levels of filmmaking needed to make viewers care about the characters, or feel any sort of anxiety or fear at the subject matter. The prescription here, take no doses of Visiting Hours, and watch something else instead.

Assorted Musings

• Michael Ironside was cast based on his performance as the psychically powered  antagonist in David Cronenberg’s Scanners.
• This was not William Shatner’s first horror film. He had worked on Kingdom of the Spiders, The Devil’s Rain, and Incubus. Of course he is best known for his work as Captain Kirk on the Star Trek television series and films.