Den Surles | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!

This week, Jonathan and Mark help out a vet.

Episode 5.7 “The Squeaky Wheel”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on June 16th, 1989)

Jonathan and Mark attempt to turn Wayne Secret (Robert David Hall) into a disability activist. Having lost his legs in Vietnam, Wayne wants to live a quiet life with his wife (Deborah Benson) but, while staying at a recently renovated hotel, he is woken up by a fire alarm. With the the elevators not working and no ramps, Wayne is forced to depend on the kindness of a stranger who carries him down a flight of stairs. The fire turns out to be a false alarm but the experience leads to Wayne protesting the fact that the hotel is not wheelchair accessible.

The owner of the hotel not only agrees to make changes to the building but he also offers Wayne a job. Things are looking up for Wayne! But, when a gang of young men harass him and his wife at a drive-in movie, Wayne snaps. He buys an Uzi and then heads down to their clubhouse to take them out. Luckily, Jonathan appears and talks Wayne out of becoming a mass murderer. Wayne goes on to receive a “man of the year” award while Jonathan beats up the leader of the gang.

This episode felt very familiar. In the past, this episode would have featured Mark’s brother-in-law, Scotty. Instead, it features Wayne, who is not a particularly compelling character. I think that this episode would have worked if it had just focused on Wayne advocating for wheelchair accessible buildings. I also think it would have worked if it had just focused on Wayne’s anger to the gang and his struggle to let go of his bitterness over his war experiences. Unfortunately, trying to cram both those storylines into one 45-minute show led to the whole thing feeling half-baked.

There was one poignant scene in this episode. It opened with Mark and Jonathan visiting the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Mark got excited when he came across Michael Landon’s star. “Never heard of him,” Jonathan shrugged. “I forget you’ve been dead for forty years,” Mark replies. It captured Jonathan and Mark’s friendship, which was always been one of the more underrated aspects of Highway to Heaven. That said, it was also a bit of a sad scene as the episode itself aired a day after the death of Victor French and Landon himself would pass away nearly two years later.

The 1982 film X-Ray (also known was Hospital Massacre) opens in the early 60s. A nerdy kid named Harold gives a Valentine’s Day card to a popular girl named Susan. Susan takes one look at the card and laughs. Harold responds by taking Susan’s friend, David, and hanging him from a coat rack. Yikes!

The film then jumps forward by 19 years. Susan (Barbi Benton) is an upper class, divorced mom who has just received a promotion at work. As a part of the promotion, she was required to get a medical exam for insurance purposes. On Valentine’s Day, she heads to the hospital so that she can get the results of that exam. It should be a routine thing that only takes a few minutes. Susan may be a chain smoker but, otherwise, she’s in good health.

Unfortunately, Harold is now working at the hospital and he finally sees his chance to give Susan “a piece of my heart.” Harold fakes Susan’s test results and then murders her doctor. Susan finds herself being checked into the hospital, pretty much against her will. Since Harold didn’t do a very good job at faking her results, the doctors are all confused by Susan’s results. Some of them want to operate. Some of them just want to hold her for observation. Susan desperately wants to leave, especially when she comes to realize that Harold is killing people in the ward. As the doctors and nurses strap Susan down to her bed and prepare to operate, Harold goes on a rampage….

Produced by Cannon Films and directed by Boaz Davidson, X-Ray is an effectively frightening slasher film. While the film’s plot doesn’t always hang together (for instance, Susan is remarkably untraumatized by the fact that, when she was a child, her best friend was hung from a coat rack), the hospital itself is a thoroughly creepy location and the supporting characters are all either extremely strange or extremely callous. This is a slasher film that works less because of the blood that’s spilled but instead because it captures the dread that everyone feels at the prospect of having to spend any time at the hospital. Even the doctors who aren’t trying to kill Susan come across as being cold and unfeeling. The scene where Susan finds herself being ordered to undress so that she can be examined by a brusque doctor who she only met a few minutes before is, quite frankly, just as nightmarish as anything that we see Harold doing to any of his victims. The fact that no one is willing to tell Susan what’s wrong and that everyone refuses to listen to her when she gets upset over the way she’s being treated is something to which many viewers will immediately relate. And, of course, it’s not just that Susan has a madman stalking her through the hospital. It’s also that all of the other patients seem to be so strange, from the guy who wanders around with his flask of bourbon to the three old women who share a hospital room with her and who talk about how, while Susan is beautiful on the outside, the inside of her body is slowly decaying.

Violent but quirky, X-Ray plays out like a filmed nightmare and it’s one of the most effective slasher films over the early 80s.