Hospitals aren’t fun places to visit, let alone stay in, and absolutely never when you are detained at one without your consent. The latter makes a hospital a house of horrors, which is what Boaz Davidson’s 1981 slasher X-Ray – originally titled Hospital Massacre – brings to screen.
To be specific, Susan (Barbi Benton) was the fixation of a boy Harold in their childhood. Nineteen years later, she enters a hospital to receive the results of her medical tests without suspecting that she’d be taken hostage by a psychopath in scrubs with a knife and every other sharp weapon good for stabbing. A lot of blood, screaming, and false scare moments fall in Susan’s way before she can step out of the hospital again. (Oops, was that a spoiler?)
X-Ray has a seriously weak plot and pretty much zero character development. The characters have almost no to literally no backstories. The movie’s plot-character graph, if possible to display electronically, will come out as flat as a dead person’s electrocardiogram. Within the hospital setting, so many things fail the credibility test from the conduct of the doctors and weirdos mumbling on the 9th floor to the way thing are run at the place and even the protagonist’s own behavior. You’d need suspension of disbelief like never before to continue watching this one.
Despite all its flaws, X-Ray seen purely as a slasher actually works for a slasher fan (and the reviewer is one). It uses the simple recipe of keeping the viewer guessing and worrying about the protagonist – a pretty young woman – and the power of this anxiety overshadows the movie’s otherwise obtrusive drive toward engaging the audience. Perhaps the only effort to contain that recklessness of a mess was changing the working title to the somewhat sober-sounding “X-Ray” than “Hospital Massacre,” which actually better represents the movie.
