Sometimes when you're watching your Mad Slasher movie of choice and find yourself examining the storyline, you'll discover strange thing start to happen: you realize that no matter the unique trappings (high-rise building, cruise liner, summer camp, coal mine, high school), you've seen this story before.
It's not deja-vu, it's the fact that they can tell as many variations on a theme as they want but, basically, it's the same thing.
Back story, present-day setup, slow-but-steady murders (some of them under unusual circumstances), false alarms, final showdown, killer strikes multiple times, final victim strikes back, killer dies (or DO they?), horrified survivors' faces, stinger, fade out.
Sound familiar? It should if you've seen a Friday the 13th, Halloween, Child's Play or any variation or sequel thereof. I've written about them here more than once and taken into consideration the various differences in story - if they're there - but they are the same thing. Just a different shadowy killer, is all.
Now, remember back in the late Seventies/Early Eighties when they had the predecessor to the Friday the 13ths and such? These were slasher movies still, but they exclusively featured men and their masochistic killer instincts they practiced solely on women. Titles like Don't Answer The Phone, Don't Go In The House, Don't Go In The Woods, Don't Walk In The Kitchen With Those Muddy Feet, Don't Talk With Your Mouth Full and others made for a full plate for feminist protesters everywhere. And they were out there, believe me; protesting the fact that men were out there killing women - young and old - all over the place on the big screen. (okay, maybe I made up a couple of those, but you get the idea...)
In fact, the most infuriating thing for all these protesters about this entire sordid enterprise was that in every instance of these movies, the victim (the FEMALE victim) is shown to be weak, helpless, easily frazzled, and even-more easily victimized.
Is that a problem, you ask? I'll let you pose that question to a woman and then you get back to me.
In the meantime, let's go to 1982: dozens of variations on this theme have passed, millions raked in and even more were on the way. But it was about here that they (studios, producers) thought they could dress up the genre a bit. Yeah; dress up a movie about murdering women. A year earlier Paramount Pictures released The Fan with no less a victim than Lauren Bacall, and co-stars such as James Garner and Maureen Stapleton along for the gory ride. So with this in mind, 20th Century Fox went the same route and infused their sleazy little slasher with vitamin Lee Grant and an extra fortified shot of William Shatner!
The film was Visiting Hours, it was set in a hospital for the most part and, in spite of the cast and setting (and its strict adherence to The Cunningham/Mancuso Directive), gave us...say it with me...the same old thing.
Killer plot coming through: Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant) is a controversial TV journalist, whose feminist views and championing of battered women and their rights upsets the wrong man. A homicidally-deranged woman-hater, Colt Hawker (Michael Ironside) has hated women since a traumatizing incident from his youth turned him against...well, women in general, I guess. So he breaks into her home, kills Deborah's maid and nearly succeeds in killing her as well. Somehow, Deborah manages to survive the attack and is rushed to the city hospital. Realizing she is still alive, Hawker sneaks into the hospital with the goal to kill her once and for all. It all leads up to a climax where dark hospital halls, lots of sharp objects and blunt force trauma all figure in a battle to the death....
Now I'm not against violent movies in general. Not if we have a good story to carry it along. There was reason for it and reason to follow it through in Charles Bronson's classic meditation on capital punishment Death Wish. The Class of 1984 was not necessarily a movie I liked but I appreciated everything it managed to come across with and how it told a very tightly-knit revenge story. Even a movie like Sleepaway Camp told us the same thing but did it with all its cliches in check and certainly did it with a fascinating twist. The problem with Visiting Hours is that this is a story that only fits in the same mold as its early 1980 brethren.
We've had films in what is called the Mad Slasher Golden Age such as My Bloody Valentine, Happy Birthday To Me, Mother's Day, Terror Train, The Prowler, Maniac, The Burning, Silent Scream, Final Exam, He Knows You're Alone, Schizoid, When a Stranger Calls...there's more, believe me. And all of them do the same thing that Visiting Hours does, just all in their own varying degrees. It's kind of like saying that they're all car crashes - just this one's a Chrysler, that one's a Ford, this one here's a Yugo...understand?
But seeing that I'm getting ahead of myself, let's backtrack: director Jean-Claude Lord is a native of Canada (surprise!) and at least TRIED to get a giallo vibe going here, what with Hawker's penchant for photographing his dying victims and assembling these pictures in his home and the doom and gloom all being very shadowy and artfully positioned, at least, in spite of the blood and gore. After all, this is the man who gave us a sequel to Eddie and the Cruisers (a fave movie of mine), so I'll let him slide.
The writer, however, one Brian Taggert, is an unadulterated hack who seems to know nothing about writing aside from assembling cliches and cliched dialogue like a Mad Libs page. He's also responsible for Of Unknown Origin (another killer rat vs. man movie), The New Kids (another Sean S. Cunningham kids and killing movie - from 1985!!!), Wanted: Dead or Alive (another "TV-to-movie" effort), Poltergeist III (another Poltergeist sequel), and Omen IV: The Awakening (another direct-to-TV Satanic movie sequel). Feeling warm fuzzies yet? Must be your bunny slippers, champ....
Not a one of these actors invest their parts with anything that could conceivably be called a performance. Grant is an actress, an honest-to-goodness actress who has been in such fine examples of the art as Detective Story, Buona Sera Mrs. Campbell, In The Heat Of The Night, The Landlord, Shampoo and Plaza Suite. Of course, she's also been in latter day efforts like Airport '77, Damien: Omen II, The Swarm, When You Comin' Back Red Ryder?, The Mafu Cage and Charlie Chan And The Curse Of The Dragon Queen. She's had bad times onscreen and though she at least fights back some here, she's more of a symbol than a character. I'll get to what I mean in a second.
Williams Shatner (a nice slice of prime Canadian ham, himself) plays William Shatner. Looking for everything like a man who had some free time in-between episodes of "T.J. Hooker", Shatner offers his face, his acting and his toupee to the service of the script as the TV producer/romantic interest of Grant's character. And while it's always good to see him do his thing, this is more like a walk-through than a walk-on.
Michael Ironside (another Canadian? what IS this??) has based an entire career on being a violent thug and it's worked quite well for him. A career stretching from 1977 on, Ironside has given us violent henchmen, violent ESP practitioners, violent alien overlords, violent generals, violent sheriffs,violent detectives, violent majors, violent inspectors, violent colonels, violent doctors, violent video game voices...let's face it, he's just good at being violent. And it's not like he has the shrinking violet part. He gets to chase women around while wearing their jewelry and nothing else, grind his forearm in broken glass, glower menacingly and have flashbacks - it's not his fault that he has both the most showy part in Visiting Hours and the most thankless. Being a misogynistic murderous loner lout has its perks but being sympathetic isn't one of them.
Linda Purl, a familiar character actress from TV and movies, plays a sympathetic part as a hospital nurse/future victim, but she also suffers the same fate as most every woman who has more than five minutes of screen time in this movie: she will be stalked, threatened, victimized, endangered and attacked. All the while her acting will consist of worried looks, sweats, wide eyes, cowering, whimpers, screams and gasps and little else. Too bad.
The astute Canuck-watcher will also recognize Harvey Atkin in the cast: he of the big mustache, big glasses and expressive face whom you no doubt will remember as Morty (not Mickey) from 1978's Meatballs and a whole slew of other things. Not that he does anything noteworthy here, but just to let you know: this movie has Harvey Atkin in it. So there you go.
Now, what I said about Grant being a symbol instead of a character: she represents the fiercely independent woman of the early Eighties who has ideas, ambition and a strong sense of self. This was, of course, the biggest threat to the men in the movie (not only the antagonist, but ALL the men) and made her both the main character AND the main victim. Think about it: movies like have to have at least one woman in it that stands up to the men, proves she is their equal if not better and that, in and of itself, makes her a threat to all bastions of masculinity that must be conquered and vanquished.
That is not only a symbol in whatever movie like this you choose, but also for the viewer (male or female) to focus on and realize that, if any woman dares act too independent in a male-dominated world, she will pay the price. That sounds more than a little Cro-Magnon-ish but isn't that basically what it all boils down to? And once the independent, assertive woman gets chased and threatened, she turns into a crying, whimpering, cringing weakling, losing every thread of character she had only a few scenes before. It's happened more than once and it sure does happen here.
I realize I'm starting to sound like an old Siskel and Ebert review for something like Eyes of a Stranger or Mother's Day but the fact that Visiting Hours does nothing more interesting than retell a familiar story with no twists other than different people and different setting belies the weakness of these movies: if all you're going to prove in your movie is that women automatically become weak and cowering when pitted against a male aggressor, then all you're doing is reinforcing decade upon decade of static cliches without even bothering to make a difference in what you show.
That was the difference in movies like 1978's Halloween and even the later Scream movies: at least they didn't give us the same thing. They gave us women that thought, were resourceful, clever and bothered to establish characters that made you actually invest yourself in their situation and care about what happened to them. That's why the patron goddesses of this genre are names like Jamie Lee Curtis and Neve Campbell.
Now as far as this goes, I know I'm going to get some feedback on this along the lines of what a great movie Visiting Hours is, how great the cinematography is, how awesome and menacing Ironside is as the killer and how perfect a character we have in Lee Grant. Fine. Have at it. All I can do is tell you that this is NOT the rose-colored classic you think it is. There's a lot to be said for revisiting the past, but not when it makes you question why you thought the movie in question was a classic to begin with.
I didn't like Visiting Hours, not even when it first came out. You just feel unclean watching something like that that tries to fool you into thinking you're watching something not only artful and creative but - dare I say - different. In reality, all Visiting Hours ends up becoming is one of many; a patchwork affair made from different rotted fabrics. If that's what you choose to watch, by all means do.
Just don't blame me if you've seen this story before. It's not like you weren't warned.
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Visiting Hours (1982)
