A HOSPITAL FLIRTS WITH A MALPRACTICE LAWSUIT ON VALENTINE'S DAY
★☆☆☆☆ (Kill It with Fire)
Director: Boaz Davidson
1981
X–Ray (also known as Hospital Massacre) requires the audience to be as brain-dead as the characters and script. It takes itself too seriously to be fun, the story is too nonsensical to be scary, and it’s too lazy to be redeemable, even by good-bad movie standards. The lulls will bore you, the kills are uninspired. The most clever thing the movie does is pull out some thingamajig surgeons use to cut open a patient, but we barely see the slicing and dicing. It’s a good thing we have a Playboy Bunny running around half-naked or we’d need a defibrillator to bring us back to life.
The holiday in this film is Valentine’s Day, and the story begins as a little girl named Susan and her brother play with trains in their house while a sneering boy watches them from the window. After Susan snubs his valentine, the wicked kid with no backstory retaliates by impaling her brother on a coat hanger, and that’s the last you’ll ever hear of her sibling. Years later, when Susan’s a sexy, divorced mother (Playboy Bunny Barbi Benton), that pivotal moment in her life—and the repercussions—are moot. The tale is now about how Susan roams a hospital’s corridors trying to find her doctor who has some mysterious test results.
Barbi Benton’s dead eyes and inability to emote is telling; she has two dials: Meeting with Tax Advisor (Level 1) and Imminent Danger (Level 1000). The most obnoxious moment in the film is when—during what’s supposed to be a tense moment with doctors—she’s forced to put on a hospital gown behind a transparent partition that captures every sexy movement and the popping out of each boob. We then get some close-ups as the doctor gives her a massage…er, I mean, exam, by moving his hands all over her voluptuous bod. Benton’s performance is so bad, that doctor should have taken her pulse. Hey, not everyone can be Patty Mullen (Frankenhooker).
Just a liiiiitle higher.
Susan’s quixotic search for her doctor throughout the day and night coincides with a killer running loose in the hospital. He’s obviously there for her, but that doesn’t explain all the other dead bodies, just people going about their typing and cleaning. Characters are introduced only to become literal red shirts one minute later. All of this is part of some bizarre and convoluted scheme to get Susan strapped to a gurney alone with him and if our heroine was even remotely likable, we might care if he succeeds. She’s aloof and devoid of personality—unless smoking counts as personality.
All the while, you’ll notice the sprinkling of Valentine’s Day decorations around the hospital as a cheap tie-in to the first scene. Get used to suspension of disbelief. Susan roams the building for hours while her boyfriend waits in the car for her…no one notices the one elevator is out of order…doctors hold her against her will without giving her an explanation… After Susan gets upset, one doctor threatens to operate on her! Operate on what? Why? This isn’t some Nellie Bly, third-world asylum. Even in the days before HIPAA laws, people had rights. The lack of basic understanding of our medical system gives off a whiff of incompetence that permeates throughout the film.
The single good thing about X-Ray is the score. It’s operatic and jarring, and obviously ended up in the wrong movie. There are two light-hearted moments in X-Ray, though one is unintentional. A trio of elderly ladies cause mischief and talk smack, and then there’s the funniest kill, when our murderer dressed in scrubs chases a nurse down the hall while holding up a blanket. She just assumes he’s a killer because he’s running, and doesn’t once go, “Doctor So-and-So? Is that you?” If you made a gif of this, you could burn the rest of the movie in the basement with the toxic hospital waste.
"Not the blanket!"
SPOILERS I thought the film would be redeemed by some sort of twist, that after Susan defeated the bad guy she would find out her file held grave news (her intense smoking throughout the film felt like it was leading somewhere). Instead, the lazy ending cuts from the moment of Susan’s victory to her emerging bright-eyed and bushy-tailed from the hospital on a sunny day as she runs into the arms of her equally happy daughter and ex-husband. I have a few questions. How much is she going to ask for in the impending lawsuit? Where are the cop cars? Where’s her conversation with the police? And the most important question: What was in her file? We’ll never know. I like to think Susan had a brain tumor because nobody is daft enough to wander the halls of a hospital for five hours calling out, “Doctor? Doctor? Where’s my doctor?” Good horror must have brains and a heart, and X-Ray has neither.
GENRES: Serial Killer
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