Horror

Visiting Hours (1982)

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I am not a fan of hospitals. I can’t take three steps into one without being overcome with a wave of anxious nausea, keenly aware that somewhere in that building — far closer than I’d like — someone is drawing his or her last breath. Ironically, it’s that same anxiety that draws me to hospital-set and medical-themed horror movies, since they allow me to face my fear without risk or consequence. Having seen a lot of them, I can comfortably say that the 1982 Canadian-made Visiting Hours ranks near the top of the list.

While it admittedly never exploits its setting as effectively as Boaz Davidson’s Hospital Massacre, it manages to avoid descending into the ridiculous camp that mars that otherwise interesting effort and, more importantly, creates sympathetic characters we want to see live, rather than die — the hallmark of every successful horror movie.

The film stars Michael Ironside as a misogynist maniac on a mission to kill the popular female broadcaster (Lee Grant) who has taken on the cause of a battered woman unjustly convicted of murdering her abusive husband. When his initial attack on her is thwarted, he returns to the hospital to finish the job, but only manages to kill a bunch of other people before she is able to use his own knife to end his deadly spree.

Directed with style and tension by Jean-Claude Lord, Visiting Hours succeeds thanks to effective performances from its talented cast, which also includes William Shatner as Grant’s producer, and Linda Purl as the young, single mom/nurse who finds herself also stalked by Ironside after she witnesses him leaving the scene of one of his crimes. —Allan Mott

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Comedy

Train Ride to Hollywood (1975)

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In the realm of bad musicals, most know about Can’t Stop the Music and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But Train Ride to Hollywood is so bad, I’m told it was barely released. Before the Village People and Bee Gees made their ill-fated attempts at box-office glory, the four-man R&B group Bloodstone — perhaps best-known for the hit “Natural High,” which you heard in Jackie Brown — gave it a try.

I’m thinking they shouldn’t. Playing themselves, Bloodstone is about to go onstage for a concert when one of the members slips and conks his noggin, forcing him into an unconscious world that we must endure along with him for 80-some-odd minutes. When Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream, certainly he meant the opposite of this, which casts the guys as train conductors only a step or two above the demeaning level of Stepin Fetchit.

Said choo-choo is headed to Tinseltown, and the passengers are impersonations of movie legends Humphrey Bogart, W.C. Fields, Dracula and Clark Gable, who uses the “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” joke more than once. Also aboard are a sheik with seven whores, Caged Heat’s Roberta Collins as Jean Harlow, and most notably, Terminal Island’s Phyllis Davis squeezed into Scarlett O’Hara’s corset. Marlon Brando kills some of the passengers by having them smell his armpits. Oh, sorry: spoiler alert. And one of the guys boxes a gorilla.

Yes, it sure sounds wacky, but it’s a groaner without a clue, much less a successful gag. Admittedly, the songs Bloodstone wrote for the film aren’t bad — a couple of them are even as catchy as herpes — but it’s like wrapping a pizza not in a cardboard box, but a discarded diaper. Would you want to eat that? —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Altered States (1980)

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There’s no need to watch Altered States while in an altered state, because crazed director Ken Russell appears to have done that for us. That very well could be why the science fantasy goes awry shortly after setup.

Professor Eddie Jessup (William Hurt, in his first starring role) is studying man’s ability to enter other forms of consciousness, but his time in the floating tank only takes him so far. So he goes to Mexico to partake in some ritual involving a tribal magic-mushroom concoction that looks like fecal stew. It causes him to have überkooky hallucinations of a seven-eyed goat, rape, sand lizards, a lava closet — in other words, Russell’s mid-morning daydreams and happy thoughts.

Eventually, the effects of the poop soup strengthen when Jessup soaks in a sensory-deprivation tank, causing him to regress into a primal, ape-like man. Speaking of apes, Blair Brown’s armpits are razor-neglected; she plays his love interest/wife/ex-wife (all in the span of about 15 minutes) who had a big, red flag not to continue their relationship when he admits to envisioning a crucified Christ when he orgasms.

Then 5, Drew Barrymore plays one of the Jessup children. (I didn’t check the credits, but perhaps she consulted on the hallucination scenes?) The most interesting portion of the film is when Hurt’s arms and torso start to bubble up mid-morph — nothing a little tough-actin’ Tinactin couldn’t fix — and eventually goes full-devo Darwin, turning the local zoo into his personal Golden Corral. He leaves quite a mess, which is the most apt description for Russell’s film — one full of big ideas, but little coherence and lots of, in the words of one shouting character, “Kabbalistic, quantum, friggin’ dumb, limbo mumbo-jumbo!” —Rod Lott

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Action

Rambo (2008)

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Women. Don’t listen to ’em. Snake-wranglin’ John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) doesn’t when Colorado church missionary member Sarah (Julie Benz) comes to Thailand to ask him to take her team to Burma. He turns her down because it’s a literal war zone. She pleads. He says no. She pleads again. He says no. She pleads again. He says no. She pleads even more. He says “oh, alright,” probably just to shut her up.

And then what happens? Just what he said would: The Christians are either killed or kidnapped by Burmese rebels. And Rambo is asked by the pastor (Ken Howard) to take a group of mercenaries there to save them. At least that allows Rambo — in Rambo, the fourth in the franchise — to do what he does best: slaughter foreigners. Way to go, Julie Benz, you’ve now got the blood of hundreds on your hands. Women.

In all seriousness, the 20-year gap between Rambo III and this comeback vehicle works to the action extravaganza’s benefit. Namely, CGI allows Stallone to make this rumble in the jungle as vile and violent as he wanted. Heads roll. Arms and legs fly. Torsos explode. Burma, shaved.

It may seem crass to use a real-life genocide as the jumping-off point for a Hollywood blockbuster, but it does shed a beam of awareness on a problem of which popcorn-munchers likely were ignorant. For Stallone, doing so lets him engage in a wish-fulfillment fantasy, doing things onscreen he cannot do off. Don’t worry, action fans: The politics behind it are splattered — if not all but obscured — with the red stuff. Mass extermination: That’s entertainment! —Rod Lott

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