“Love hurts, love scars. Love wounds and marks any heart,” as Nazareth once sang, or the Everly Brothers, if you’re old school. Yes, love can take its toll on anyone, and in the case of X-Ray aka Hospital Massacre aka Or Else aka Ward 13 aka Be My Valentine, it’s a body toll.
I’m surprised there aren’t more horror Valentine’s Day movies. Hell, I’m surprised there aren’t more Valentine’s Day movies in general. A day where people are pressured to express one of the most powerful emotions by any means necessary feels like the perfect impetus for any kind of movie, whether it’s a rom-com or a slasher.
Yet, as I was perusing my potential Wuv Week candidates for this edition of “Freaky Friday”, because you know I’m gonna do a horror movie for Friday the 13th, it felt like picking through a box of chocolates where all that was left were various kinds of coconut. Don’t get me wrong, I like coconut, but it’s never going to be my first choice.
My Bloody Valentine from 1981 is probably the best Valentine’s Day horror movie. It’s definitely the most famous, but I’ve seen it plenty of times and reviewed it here on the blog back in the Obama days.
There’s the 2009 remake, which I’ve also seen multiple times. It’s funny because of the whole 3D angle, but not a movie I felt the need to revisit. There’s Valentine, a so-so Scream knockoff from 2001, but again, I’ve seen it, it’s whatever, no need or interest to review it here.
Now, there is a recent Valentine’s Day horror movie I had planned to write about, but after watching it and not enjoying it, I decided against it. This week is about love; I don’t want to waste 1,315 words writing about the opposite.
So what’s left? There are plenty of horror movies about love: Bride of Frankenstein, Bride of Chucky, Bride of Re-Animator, basically anything with “Bride” in the title. Then I found today’s little scuffed-up sweetheart of a movie and decided to choo-choo-choose it for my review.
Marketed and sold under many different titles, though I prefer its original one, X-Ray is a Valentine’s Day-set slasher about a woman being stalked in a hospital by a killer posing as a surgeon.
If you’re saying to yourself, “Hey, that’s just Halloween II,” you’re right. Actually, between 1981 and 1982 there were three hospital-set slashers: Halloween II, Visiting Hours, and today’s film. So there isn’t anything particularly original about X-Ray.
What X-Ray has going in its favor is that it’s a well-directed, well-shot slasher dripping with atmosphere and led by a stunning ingenue in Barbi Benton. Is it predictable? Yes. Is it entertaining? Also yes.
X-Ray was produced by Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan and distributed by their company, Cannon Films, known for releasing such cult-classic ’80s B-movies as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Lifeforce, Runaway Train, Invasion U.S.A., Masters of the Universe, Breakin’, and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, to name a few.
Despite producing and acquiring their fair share of schlock, I do consider myself a Cannon fan. It’s hard not to be after watching the 2014 documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. Golan and Globus produced low-budget, high-sensation movies driven by sex, violence, and pure video-store adrenaline, and hey, every once in a while they made a good movie too.
Never a studio to shy away from trends, X-Ray, along with other Cannon slashers like New Year’s Evil (1980) and Schizoid (1980), was part of the post-Halloween slasher boom of the early ’80s, movies that were cheap to produce, packed with sex and gore, and hey, if you could tie into a holiday too, that meant a repeat rental every year!
X Ray is interesting because like Golan and Globus, director Boaz Davidson was also a filmmaker who had found success in his native Israel before making Hollywood films. Throughout the 1970s, Davidson made a string of successful Boureakas films (comedy-melodramas), in particular, Lemon Popsicle (1978), a teen comedy set in early-1960s Tel Aviv that was at the time, the highest grossing Israeli film of all time.
Davidson moved to America in 1979 and started making films with Cannon, including a 1982 remake of Lemon Popsicle called The Last American Virgin. But today we’re talking about X-Ray.
X-Ray was written by novelist/screenwriter Marc Behm. Most famous for co-writing the book, The Unsuspecting Wife with Peter Stone, which later became the movie Charade and for co-writing the script to The Beatles’ Help, Behm’s background doesn’t scream slasher movies, but you have to remember how popular the genre was at the time. IMDb credits at least 36 slasher films released in 1981 alone.
I wish I could say that talents like Marc Behm and Boaz Davidson elevate X-Ray above most slashers of the time, but I will say the movie was better than I expected. The film is genuinely creepy on more than one occasion and I do like the film’s lead character Susan, played by actress and Playboy model Barbi Benton. So it’s far from the worst of the genre.
Set on Valentine’s Day, Susan (Benton) is a career woman starting a new job, but before she can begin, she must undergo a physical for her insurance. What should be a routine appointment turns into a nightmare when her paperwork is tampered with, forcing her to remain at the hospital for further examinations.
The film opens in the past, much like Halloween, showing a young Susan receiving a Valentine’s card from a boy named Harold. She crumples it up and laughs at him, an act that results in Harold killing her friend David by hanging him from a hat stand. I have no clue how a child orchestrates such a grisly murder.
This background makes it easy to assume Harold is now working at the hospital and is the one responsible for keeping Susan detained by the staff. It’s not much of a mystery but I was impressed by how well it captures the uneasiness of hospitals.
Anyone who has spent an extended period of time in a hospital knows the feeling of uncertainty, doctors not telling you everything, running tests you don’t understand. The idea of turning Susan into a prisoner gives the film a sense of tension more akin to a paranoid thriller than a slasher. Sure, people get picked off like in a slasher, but this is by no means an ensemble; this is Barbi Benton’s film.
Best known for being a Playboy Playmate, Barbi Benton makes a genuine effort to be scared, and for the most part, it works. No one else really jumped out at me, even the killer feels underwhelming considering he’s just wearing scrubs. I also had a pretty good idea who the killer was the whole movie.
X-Ray is all about vibes. The moody hospital, which was an actual former hospital, always feels dim, and I could swear they had fog machines running in there. The film is well shot for how simplistic it is. The kill scenes are serviceable; I do like the idea of medical tools being utilized, but the gore never goes as far as I want it to. With a few tweaks, this could be a made-for-TV movie, which isn’t an insult. The thriller elements are just stronger than the slasher elements.
What I could have used more of was Valentine’s theming. Apart from the cold open set in the 1960s and the occasional shot of a desk or corkboard decorated with paper hearts, there isn’t much that reads as Valentine’s Day. Which is funny, because the holiday angle would have made the film easier to market. A small complaint, but a valid one.
I remember reading that horror movies make good date nights. Adrenaline fuels attraction, so why not throw on X-Ray to get that dopamine rush? Trust me, you have nothing to fear… until they operate!
Happy Wuv Week, everyone!