Simply Perfect

Load of rubbish!!

Good concept, poorly executed.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

When Susan was a kid she laughed at the dorky kid Harold who gave her a valentine, and in a rage he murdered her best friend. 19 years later Susan is divorced, and is going to the local hospital for a check-up. Meanwhile something, possibly someone, is slowly murdering people in the hospital and hiding the bodies.Susan finds the hospital very annoying and incredibly creepy, especially Doctor Saxon, who acts very pervy during her routine check-up and begins groping her while outside the door, a drunk patient watches since she is naked. The doctor tells her something is very wrong and orders her to spend the night, where she is kept in the mental health ward with a gang of spooky old ladies. Little does Susan know, she's about to be in for a very horrific stay at the hospital.Hospital Massacre had elements of Autopsy (2008). As with most medical horror movies, it gets into scaring the audience with things like surgery and internal organs, and it was very easy to guess the next events that were going to happen. It followed the typical slasher film plot; the woman gets perused by a maniac until she finally figures out who he is. It was more weird than scary, to be honest.

Hospital Massacre starts in Los Angeles in 1961 where a young boy named Harold (Billy Jane) leaves a Valentine's Day card for the girl he fancies Susan (Elizabeth Hoy), however she does not return the sentiment & laughs at Harolds card before ripping it up & throwing it on the floor. Harold is devastated & kills Susan's friend Dave (Michael Romano) in revenge. Jump forward '19 Years Later' & Susan (Barbi Benton) is due to collect the results of some routine medical tests from a local hospital, however her doctor Dr. Jacobs (Gay Austin) seems to have disappeared & Susan is growing impatient & ask's resident intern Harry (Charles Lucia) to help. Taking a look at Susan's results Harry refers her to Dr. Saxon (John Warner Williams) as the tests provide cause for concern, Susan is admitted but soon finds out that a killer in a surgical mask is killing off anyone associated with her & eventually comes for her...Also known under the titles X-Ray & Be My Valentine, or Else... this fairly routine, unremarkable & obscure early 80's slasher was directed by Boaz Davidson who has since gone on to be a prolific producer with over 130 films credited on his IMDb profile & produced by the infamous Cannon Films who were never slow in making cheap rip-offs of the latest trend & here with Hospital Massacre they were trying to cash-in on the popularity of the teen slasher. The script is a bland collection of slasher film clichés, the isolated setting, the female lead who has to get tough in order to survive, the crazed killer, the half hearted twist reveal, a tragic or horrible event from the past sparking off a series of murders, various bit part character's killed off in various ways before a long & drawn out final chase between the female lead & the killer through lots of dark corridors. Hospital massacre had promise I suppose but nothing really ties the individual aspects of the script together, why has the killer gone to such elaborate lengths to fool Susan & the doctor's into thinking she is ill? What happened to Harry from the prologue? Wasn't he put away in prison or a mental hospital or something? Why does Dr. Saxon acts so strangely? He never tells Susan anything & walks around with those two nurses either side of him like bodyguards! No-one in the place seems to know what they are doing & seem very vague & evasive about answering questions & no-one seems bother by the sudden & unexplained disappearance of several staff members. Why kill anyone else other than Susan? If all the killer wanted was Susan's heart why involve anyone else at all? Again why this over complicated plan to make everyone think she was ill? At just under 80 odd minutes (the IMDb says that a longer 90 odd minutes version was released but I don't believe this as nothing looked missing except a few badly edited death scenes & nothing amounting to ten minutes) at least it's fairly short but the character's are thin, hard to care about & the dialogue is wooden. There are enough murders & there's even a bit of nudity but Hospital Massacre feels tame & is pretty forgettable even by 80's teen slasher standards.Several other 80's slasher films used a hospital setting, most notably Halloween II (1981) & Visiting Hours (1982) both of which are better than Hospital Massacre. Even the Valentine's Day aspect had been done before & with better effect in My Bloody Valentine (1981). Despite the title the gore is quite restrained, there's some blood splatter, a guy has his face burned with acid, people are stabbed with various surgical instruments, a guy has an axe in the head, someone gets a spike through his throat, there's an off screen decapitation & bizarrely a kid is impaled on a hat stand! None of the kills stand out or are particularly memorable. The setting doesn't look much like a hospital most of the time with dark corridors & lots of wooden doors, there doesn't seem to be any wards or many doctor's about.Probably shot on a fairly low budget Hospital Massacre was filmed in Los Angeles & is quite well made for what it is, it's certainly no worse looking than any other slasher from the period even if it's not as good as many of them. The acting isn't great, everyone except Benton tries to act suspiciously to keep us guessing but they just come across as silly looking. Former Play-mate & country singer Benton gets to strip for her examination but otherwise makes for a forgettable lead.Hospital Massacre is a pretty average 80's slasher with a lack of gore & a plot that tries to be suspenseful & mysterious but just ends up being a bit of a random mess with various killings thrown in. I have seen worse but then again I have seen a lot better too.

I sometimes wonder why hospital horror isn't more of a booming sub-genre. Personally I can't think of a much more nightmare concept than a place of healing turned to harm, of those we entrust with our health turned against our better interests. Hospital Massacre doesn't take on the task in an especially advanced manner but it does manage to stand out a little from its obscure slasher contemporaries. Its success is rooted in a marriage of weirdness to smart pace, offbeat tone with enough excitement and strange sights to move remarkably smoothly. The film is focused on the unfortunate Susan, pursued by an amorous nut-case who has already maligned her in childhood and now takes the opportunity to turn a routine hospital visit into a frightening collision of Kafka and slasher cheese by way of a bit of result tampering. Yep, you read right, Kafka. The hospital and staff in this one are about the least welcoming, least friendly imaginable with our heroine treated in fashion uncannily similar to a prisoner in some arbitrary dictatorship, doctors and nurses like cold, faceless prison guards and an utter lack of comfort or information despite her supposedly perilous health. And it isn't just the staff that are off, there are strange patients too including mean old ladies and a wandering drunk. The general treatment of all of this is rather more melodramatic than chilling, but it stews rather nicely and is happily spiked with murders, oftimes nicely mean if never especially gory. Barbi Benton has an appealing presence as the bedevilled Susan, lovely looking lady and enthusiastic too, she doesn't act much above soap opera levels but carries the film amply, while Charles Lucia makes for an effectively barmy villain. Excess seems to be the key to the writing and direction, so murders are pushed into jabbering lunacy, moments of style or tension bust out at random and strangeness pulses thickly at all times. I do wish the film mustered more intensity earlier on though, it only really comes ablaze in the final twenty something minutes and it definitely could have done with more gore and death, though what's there is fun and often portrayed with flair somehow it comes off with little impact. There are also bits and bobs of silliness that go above and beyond the general tone of the film and I had a few minor gripes about things like the lack of hospital personnel, off performances from supporting characters and so on. Still, overall I was reasonably impressed by this one, surprisingly strange, occasionally inspired and never dull, better than average for a no count early 80's slasher, that's for darned sure. Definitely worth a watch if this sort of thing takes your fancy, though it won't convert anyone doesn't. Solid 7/10 from me then...

"Hospital Massacre" has a derivative plot outline, a familiar setting, clichéd situations and largely uninspired murder sequences … and yet still it's an above average and engaging little 80's slasher film that even is – do I daresay it – a little bit underrated! Back in the early eighties, hospitals were quite the popular setting for horror movies ("Visiting Hours", "Halloween II") and they incidentally also loved holiday-themed slashers ("Happy Birthday To Me", "Silent Night Deadly Night"). "Hospital Massacre" cleverly takes the best of both worlds, as the massacre takes place in a hospital on Valentine's Day! The prototypic pre-credits opening sequence is golden slasher stuff. The lovely 12-year-old Susan Jeremy receives a Valentine's card at her house from an unpopular boy who peeps through her window to catch a glimpse of her reaction. Little Susan is not very impressed with the card and her bratty younger brother even mocks the author. When Susan returns from the kitchen, her little brother is hanging dead on a coat hanger… What a lovely little appetizer, ain't it? I have a weakness for slashers that begin with an exaggeratedly OTT and gruesome flashback to indicate where the horror in the rest of the film originates from. Anyway, cut to 19 years later, when cute little Susan grew up to become a stunningly gorgeous 30-something year old divorced MILF (played by Playboy starlet Barbi Benton). She checks in to the hospital on Valentine's Day to pick up some formality test results, but enters a genuine and life-altering nightmare. There's a vicious killer lose and he/she apparently set up a whole evil master plan to keep Susan hospitalized and drive her paranoid. He/she kills nurses and doctors to change Susan's X-ray test results – making it look like she's terminally ill – and sadistically sends her the decapitated head of her new boyfriend in a box of Valentine's Day pastry. Could it be her childhood admirer returned after nearly 20 years of unprocessed rage and frustration? "Hospital Massacre" is a fairly well-scripted and suspenseful 80's effort, benefiting from the skillful direction of Boaz Davidson and the agitating charisma of Barbi Benton. The hospital setting isn't worked out well enough – they could have done so much more with it – and the red herrings (Susan's vile ex-husband suddenly disappearing, the mysterious old drunk wandering around the hospital floors, etc…) stupidly miss their effect. On the plus side, the characters are well developed and the murder sequences are effectively morbid. Perhaps it's not the goriest of films, but several scenes are quite brutal and offensive, like the axe-in-the-head murder or the poor nurse who has a gigantic syringe shoved in her spine. The pace even speeds up near the climax and the final confrontation between Susan and her assailant is impressive. Surely recommended to all fans of 80's horror. And yes, Barbi does go topless.