Visiting Hours
Picture: B-
Sound: C+ Extras:
C Film: B-
The Canadian-made Visiting Hours (1982) belongs
with The Fan (1981) as slasher movies that tried to
camouflage what they were by casting legitimate actors. And
like The Fan, which starred Lauren Bacall as a Broadway
actress stalked by a young psychotic (Michael Biehn), Visiting Hours
does manage to rise above the usual dead teenager formula so prevalent in
the early 1980s.
After making a big impression as bad scanner Darryl Revok in David
Cronenberg's Scanners a year earlier, Michael Ironside went on
to play an even scarier guy in Visiting Hours.
Ironside does such a good job at portraying such a menacing and completely
despicable villain in his second major film that it's no wonder he's been
typecast as a heavy throughout much of his career. Looking like Jack
Nicholson's younger brother and sounding a lot like John Saxon, Ironside puts
an everyman face on the mad slasher, who'd become a masked phantom in so
many other horror films at the time.
Ironside plays Colt Hawker, a sadistic psychopath who
gets off on killing people and taking pictures of them as they gasp for their
last breaths. In flashbacks we see that
Colt was abused as a child and never recovered from a childhood incident where
he witnessed his mother dump boiling water on his abusive father. As an
adult, Colt clearly hates women, especially strong women, and
has developed a hateful obsession with a feminist news reporter named
Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant).
After surviving an attack by Colt inside her home one night,
Deborah is taken to a major metropolitan hospital, and Colt
spends the rest of the movie devising ways to get into the hospital to finish
her off. The killer in the hospital plot is reminiscent of
another slasher flick from 1981, Halloween II.
Considerable screen time is also devoted to a young nurse and
single mother (Linda Purl), who Colt begins to stalk. But despite
receiving second billing, William Shatner is given very little to do here
as Deborah's TV producer. Harvey Atkin, a veteran of many Canadian
tax-shelter films from the late '70s and early '80s, appears as a garrulous
patient. With Ironside and Atkin in the same film, you can bet it's
Canadian.
Some of Visiting Hours is disturbing and
unpleasant, but the film serves its purpose. Unlike sicko
quasi-snuff films of today such as Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects,
which glorifies the violent, senseless crimes of homicidal maniacs, Visiting
Hours serves as a kind of cautionary tale that shows the biggest
monsters are often very human. And it's the kind of
pre-political correctness thriller that reminded women to "be careful
out there."
Originally distributed (and still owned) by 20th Century Fox when
it debuted in theaters in May of '82, Visiting Hours has been
given a solid 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer by Anchor Bay. The extras include four TV spots and a radio
spot. But you come away wishing director Jean-Claude Lord, writer Brian
Taggert or especially Ironside had done an audio commentary.
- Chuck O'Leary
