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.
Through the Shattered Lens 