Visiting Hours

***/*****

Look, Michael Ironside may once again be saddled in the cast roster at like #3, but he’s the star of this film. He was an overwhelming presence in Scanners and here in Visiting Hours he’s a force of absolute fear. Ironside has been stuck in B-movies almost his entire career, but that fierce intensity and, when the role often required, ruthless aggression (he is a damn good tight-ass, too) are unmatched when he’s sharing the screen with others. No offense to Stephen Lack, but when he is onscreen with Ironside, the poor guy gets his ass kicked. I don’t think it is any real surprise that Ironside could fulfill the role of a monstrous stalking psychopath with the chilling ability to torment and terrorize. Visiting Hours seems tailor made for his brand of performance.

Lee Grant and William Shatner brought name recognition to Visiting Hours but Ironside, to me, will be what the audience will remember as the credits roll. Simple question: would you want to cross Ironside in Visiting Hours? Few would, I imagine. Shatner, bless his heart, doesn’t have a very important role, ultimately. Grant, herself, is basically the person Ironside wants to destroy. She’s the one quivering with terror, wrought with concern for her well being. Shatner is her support.

Grant is a reporter, journalist, and the face/voice of a talk/interview show. She is one of those that confront her subjects with an assertive, somewhat hard-hitting style. It could be considered controversial and questionably close to getting her or her producers in trouble if the subjects (for instance, in the film’s case a lawyer who got his client—a wife-beater—off on a technicality in a trial that had its share of ethical issues) are approached with questions/accusations that might be considered libelous. Shatner is the studio show producer who loves her but tries and fails to thwart her “grandstanding”. He has a show that needs to be impartial, but Grant loves to fight against a system she feels can be manipulated and turned against a victim and for the wrongdoer. Ironside positively hates her guts and the way she uses her show to posit a voice for those women needing a figure to represent them. When Shatner tells her he can’t allow her interview with the lawyer to go on air, she rushes off in a fit of anger. She returns home (it is rather incredible. Full of space, with lots of rooms. This was fit for a home decorating channel) and someone will be waiting for her.

The opening attack is right out of the slasher handbook. The stalking POV at the studio where Ironside is present, hidden, and keeping tabs on Grant. The home invasion where Grant comes home to Ironside waiting in a room (again, hidden) until just the right time (or when the film needs him to) to pop out and scare her silly. Then, with blade in hand and psychopathic rage at its peak, Ironside strikes. Of course, the phone line is cut and hiding in a room with a door locked can only keep Grant safe for so long. With an orchestral score to add weight to Grant’s sudden terror, the film kicks things off with a slow burn to a real confrontational outburst pitting potential killer against prey. This is within the first ten minutes so we know these two will meet again. So what happens in the remaining hour thirty  will be dictate the success of Visiting Hours.

The opening sequence where Grant barely (narrowly) escapes Ironside is basically a taste. We know that he is determined and motivated to do her in. The dumbwaiter moment was a nice touch. She is fortunate to have that dumbwaiter and his cutting the rope so she plummets to the kitchen with a neighbor entering the room to find her. There she was. Grant had burst through the wooden door to the kitchen as the dumbwaiter impacted, sliced by Ironside’s blade, crawling and pulling across the floor, and that kitchen door bursting open to reveal….the neighbor. Nice bit of work. Besides the really odd decision for Ironside to dress himself in fake jewelry, taking off the “face gear” prior to the dumbwaiter incident (after just breaking through her bedroom door like a high velocity train), I think that opening scene sets the stage nicely. Can the rest of the film follow suit?

We need to get to the hospital, though. Like Halloween II (I can’t be the only one reminded of that film while watching this one), Visiting Hours is all about the killer going after his intended victim in a hospital.

 

 

 

Established is Ironside’s disgusting choice to murder the elderly. Photographs of older women are taped inside his apartment clothing closet. He cuts the oxygen feeding tube of a patient in the hospital, sits at the bedside and watches her suffocate as her air runs out. This really demonstrates what kind of sick twisted fuck Ironside really is. He gets a visiting nurse checking in on her (the dying patient grabs her page button) as an extra prize…of course, like Michael Myers in Halloween II, Ironside can’t pass up sticking a nurse with his knife.

I can’t say I was aware of this movie until its trailer showed up on the release of Bad Dreams and it certainly caught my attention (I was also made aware of the Sam Waterston/Kathleen Quinlan film, Warning Sign (1985), as well). I wanted to see it. Of course, the trailer was certain to parade Shatner’s involvement and emphasize Grant’s predicament with a menacing Ironside. Anytime I am introduced to films that have never come across my radar, it is a cool thing. While Warning Sign might not quite have left a residue or resonance regarding its impression on me, Visiting Hours does…because of Ironside’s presence in it.

I flirted with adding Visiting Hours to the 2014 Scarecrow Slasher Summer this year, but I decided it didn’t quite make the cut. I think it has “slasher tendencies” but it was more of a psycho-thriller to me. It does provide a back story of Ironside’s boozing sonofabitch father (he visits in a rest home from time to time) and the mother who left. This hatred for all races and women perhaps stems from the mother not there for him and the father who left him with reasons to feel animosity and hostility.

Grant is vulnerable as Jamie Lee Curtis was in Halloween II. She’s under care, with a bad arm due to Ironside’s attack at the beginning of the film (and like Myers attacked Curtis in Carpenter’s Halloween). Conveniences are Grant’s friend. She was moved into another room with Ironside believing he was killing her, instead murdering someone else. It appeared that Ironside might must hide within the disguise of a surgeon and contribute to Grant’s demise during surgery, but it turns out being a false scare…it’s a good one, with us even believing he had used a substance in a needle to inject her. Ironside starts to become interested in a nurse (a divorcee with two children) that attends to Grant. This provides a secondary character for us to worry about as well.

Slasher films or films where killers pursue a victim of some significance to them turn into chase films eventually for the most part. Visiting Hours is no different. Grant is in the hospital. Ironside finds a way in there despite lots of security (taking pain meds and bashing his arm into broken beer bottle glass to get an ambulance ride right into the hospital!). He almost has her where he wants her but she has the convenience of alcohol in a vial and a nice splash to the eyes to back him off. Then goes the chase. A blade will find its way into a torso.

Obviously the chase can’t be undeterred by plausibility. How on earth can Ironside really get into a hospital with the numerous attempts on Grant’s life (and Shatner’s word that she will be heavily guarded?)? It has to happen, though, if Grant will be able to face and vanquish the man trying to annihilate her. Like Halloween II (yes, me beating a dead horse repeatedly), the hospital is amazingly empty and barely lit. Few people are shown despite all the fuss regarding the killer on the loose and Grant being a constant source of his intent to murder. I can see this being used against Visiting Hours, and I find it hard to excuse such implausibility but in order for Grant’s life to be threatened and Ironside’s receiving his just reward for his vile scumbaggery this has to occur.

The film really piles on Ironside as a piece of despicable trash. He kills the elderly, pulls out a camera, and takes photographs while they breathe their last breaths. He stabs Linda Purl in her own home while her children and nanny are upstairs, kicks her a bit, placing the phone next to her face after she had dialed for assistance, pulls out the camera, and takes pictures as she suffers! While hospital patients are asleep in their beds, he victimizes them. Grant, with a bum arm and stress mounting, must endure hardship and somehow defend herself against him. He viciously assaults a young woman (she looks just barely past a teenager), including biting her in numerous places on her back, who retaliates by having friends helping her destroy Ironside’s apartment. If anyone gets what’s coming to them it is Ironside. He might actually get off a bit easy. At least the weakened state of Grant doesn’t halt her from truly fighting back. It is really a rather fitting judgment for this racist, misogynistic, elder-abusing brute is defeated by a woman’s rights activist with an arm in a sling. Grant may spend time in bouts of hysterics but when her life is threatened, the woman won’t just cower and plead.