TheBlueHairedLawyer When Susan was a kid she laughed at the dorky kid Harold who gave her a valentine, and in a rage he murdered her best friend. 19 years later Susan is divorced, and is going to the local hospital for a check-up. Meanwhile something, possibly someone, is slowly murdering people in the hospital and hiding the bodies.Susan finds the hospital very annoying and incredibly creepy, especially Doctor Saxon, who acts very pervy during her routine check-up and begins groping her while outside the door, a drunk patient watches since she is naked. The doctor tells her something is very wrong and orders her to spend the night, where she is kept in the mental health ward with a gang of spooky old ladies. Little does Susan know, she's about to be in for a very horrific stay at the hospital.Hospital Massacre had elements of Autopsy (2008). As with most medical horror movies, it gets into scaring the audience with things like surgery and internal organs, and it was very easy to guess the next events that were going to happen. It followed the typical slasher film plot; the woman gets perused by a maniac until she finally figures out who he is. It was more weird than scary, to be honest.

Bloodwank I sometimes wonder why hospital horror isn't more of a booming sub-genre. Personally I can't think of a much more nightmare concept than a place of healing turned to harm, of those we entrust with our health turned against our better interests. Hospital Massacre doesn't take on the task in an especially advanced manner but it does manage to stand out a little from its obscure slasher contemporaries. Its success is rooted in a marriage of weirdness to smart pace, offbeat tone with enough excitement and strange sights to move remarkably smoothly. The film is focused on the unfortunate Susan, pursued by an amorous nut-case who has already maligned her in childhood and now takes the opportunity to turn a routine hospital visit into a frightening collision of Kafka and slasher cheese by way of a bit of result tampering. Yep, you read right, Kafka. The hospital and staff in this one are about the least welcoming, least friendly imaginable with our heroine treated in fashion uncannily similar to a prisoner in some arbitrary dictatorship, doctors and nurses like cold, faceless prison guards and an utter lack of comfort or information despite her supposedly perilous health. And it isn't just the staff that are off, there are strange patients too including mean old ladies and a wandering drunk. The general treatment of all of this is rather more melodramatic than chilling, but it stews rather nicely and is happily spiked with murders, oftimes nicely mean if never especially gory. Barbi Benton has an appealing presence as the bedevilled Susan, lovely looking lady and enthusiastic too, she doesn't act much above soap opera levels but carries the film amply, while Charles Lucia makes for an effectively barmy villain. Excess seems to be the key to the writing and direction, so murders are pushed into jabbering lunacy, moments of style or tension bust out at random and strangeness pulses thickly at all times. I do wish the film mustered more intensity earlier on though, it only really comes ablaze in the final twenty something minutes and it definitely could have done with more gore and death, though what's there is fun and often portrayed with flair somehow it comes off with little impact. There are also bits and bobs of silliness that go above and beyond the general tone of the film and I had a few minor gripes about things like the lack of hospital personnel, off performances from supporting characters and so on. Still, overall I was reasonably impressed by this one, surprisingly strange, occasionally inspired and never dull, better than average for a no count early 80's slasher, that's for darned sure. Definitely worth a watch if this sort of thing takes your fancy, though it won't convert anyone doesn't. Solid 7/10 from me then...

BA_Harrison When the Valentine's Day card he sends to pretty Susan Jeremy is greeted with laughter and derision, young Harold loses the plot and impales Susan's playmate on a hat-stand. Nineteen years later, a now fully grown Susan (played by Playboy playmate Barbi Benton) attends a hospital appointment only to find a still-rather-obsessed Harold waiting there to try and steal her heart once again—only this time, he intends to do it literally with a variety of nasty surgical implements!!Chock full of ridiculous red-herrings and annoying false scares, and displaying zero originality from start to finish, Boaz Davidson's Hospital Massacre is a derivative piece of slasher garbage that, at times, is so daft that it unintentionally borders on parody.In the prologue, Susan is seen brandishing a large knife, only to reveal that she is about to cut a cake; later, what looks like blood drips onto Susan's shoe but which turns out to be ketchup; an unscheduled lift stop on a deserted floor results in Susan being startled by men in masks, who are then revealed to be fumigating the level; and a human shape under a sheet turns out to be a mannequin: Hospital Massacre is absolutely littered with such dumb contrivances that really grate on the nerves.Also serving to irritate are Susan's inability to keep quiet when being stalked by the killer (she drops her lighter, knocks over reports, and clatters metal instruments at the most inopportune moments), the complete absence of any other people when the murderer strikes, the ridiculous manner in which the hospital staff treat their patients (can anyone say 'lawsuit'?), and the score, which mimics not only Harry Manfredini's music from Friday the 13th (which is understandable, I suppose), but also Jerry Goldsmith's choral chanting from The Omen (???!?!).On the plus side, there's the occasional spot of reasonable gore (including a severed head in a box, an axe in the head and a pointed thingy through the neck), an enjoyably exploitative moment where Miss Benton strips to her panties for an unnecessary all-over examination by a pervy doctor, and one incredible, must-be-seen-to-be-believed scene in which Susan runs into a room full of people covered from head-to-toe in plaster who all proceed to flail their limbs in an uncontrollable manner. Weird.

noahbbrown Forgive the pretentious summary, but i thought this film was effective precisely for all the elements other reviewers seemed to criticise. It IS fairly well shot (the dark bits are hard work) and the editing's sharp. With a big bombastic orchestral score and lots of OTT moments, this is a cheesy film with plenty of daft false scares and the like, but it's quite nightmarish too. The clichéd parts are tensely handled. Maybe I'm desensitized to bad cinema at the moment, having consumed plenty of terrible 80s slashers recently, but I thought this was pretty good. Little touches like the horrible old women sharing Barbi Benton's hospital ward, cackling like the witches from Macbeth, added to the absurd bad-dream quality. The murder scenes are well handled, violent and rough but not that splattery.This film has a similar feel to something like 'Don't Answer The Phone!' or 'The Centerfold Girls', serious in intent and not really 'camp' in any way. It's obviously 'bad cinema', but artfully done.