Certified Video Nasty-Visiting Hours

Here's a blast from the past that I totally forgot about.  This is another one of those video boxes that beckoned me as a wee lad in the back of nearly every Mom and Pop video store.

Of course, I never got around to watching it until tonight.

So...how was it?

Barbara (Lee Grant) is a news reporter and a "strong, independent woman."  Cue Destiny's Child song.

This is evidenced by a confrontation she has with a lawyer regarding a battered wife's self-defense claim against her attacker.  The fight goes a bit too far and her producer (William Shatner) pulls it from the news program.

However, the creepy, woman hating station janitor Colt (Michael ironside) has seen the whole thing.  And he isn't too happy.

So he beats Barbara to her house and kills the cleaning lady before putting on all of her jewelry/makeup and trying to kill her.

Barbara survives the attack, and when Colt finds this out, he goes to the hospital to finish what he started.  And of course, it doesn't go as easy as planned.

Visiting Hours probably wasn't a Video Nasty because the film is covered in wall-to-wall gore.  The movie is a bit dry.  Some murders are offscreen, while others are relatively bloodless.  If anything, the Nasty status most likely came from the scene where Colt makes a local Valley-Girl looking hottie (played by Lenore Zann, who I remember was the voice of Sizzle on Stunt Dawgs and Rogue on X-Men) strip before beating her.  More specifically, he traces a knife across and down her body.  Not exactly BBFC friendly, guys.

Visiting Hours itself is a mixed bag.  The film starts out well enough.  But then at one point things split into two films.  Colt decides stalking one woman isn't enough, so he decides to stalk Barbara's nurse, Sheila (Linda Purl), as well.  However, he decides to stalk Sheila at her home rather than at the hospital.  This causes many shifts between Sheila's house and the hospital setting.  The film becomes very inconsistent as a result.  Too bad, because if the film had stayed in the hospital, it could have been a tense little sleeper.

Why aren't there that many horror movies that take place in a hospital?  Hospitals are creepy places.  I've spent a few nights alone in a hospital room as a kid.  It's cold and strangely empty and the night nurses aren't attentive as they should be...but that's another story for another day.

Later.
-Justin