Politically engaged TV journalist Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant), barely escapes the murderous intentions of a mostly unspeaking serial killer (Michael Ironside) with a fondness for photographing the faces of his victims while they die during a home invasion; a friend of hers is not so lucky, and the killer escapes. Ballin’s injured enough to need to spend quite some time in the hospital. Unfortunately, the killer doesn’t seem to be done with her and starts regular visits to the hospital. He’s having trouble actually locating the journalist, but he’s clearly seeing that as an opportunity to just kill quite a few other people. The guy hates women more than men but isn’t one to overlook an opportunity for killing you, whatever your gender.
Given that the killer does this more than once without being stopped, it’ll come as no surprise to any viewer that the police here is less than useless for anyone not wanting to get brutally murdered. Luckily, Ballin’s pretty tough even in her traumatized and injured state. Plus, one of the nurses, Sheila Munroe (Linda Purl), a highly competent hard-working single mom, has taken quite a shine to the older woman and does her best to protect her and the other patients.
From time to time, William Shatner also pops in as Ballin’s boss, but I suspect he’s only in more than one scene because the production could get Shatner for a couple of days; as a character, he’s completely without consequence.
Which is perfectly alright, for at least half of Jean-Claude Lord’s Visiting Hours is difficult to read as anything but a paean to women. Specifically, women like Deborah Ballin and Sheila Munroe who do difficult jobs with competence, dignity, composure and compassion. On paper, this element of the film should not work too well with its more exploitation movie style sensibilities when it comes to the murders and the habits of its killer. In practice, the film is portraying its female characters so sympathetically, it is never a question if the film shares the killer’s hatred or not. Which doesn’t mean it is going to treat its protagonists nicely. It does, however, mean that there’s no space for a Shatner-style alpha male performance, nor any chance for these women to be rescued by anyone but themselves.
The film isn’t a gore fest. The killings do, however, have the nasty undertone of real violence, emphasising the shock and the helplessness of the victims before anything else. Ironside’s performance and Lord’s camera portray the killer’s misogyny and general hatred for humanity (going by the bits you can catch of his letters, he’s racist, to boot) through the physicality of the actor’s body as well as the staging, keeping the killer silent because there’s really no need for dialogue to express what he is about. There are a couple of flashbacks to the man’s inciting trauma that are, as well as the scenes in his apartment complete with framed letters answering his letters to TV and newspaper journalists and his murder wall, part of what looks like a conscious attempt at not turning him into a slasher movie like killing machine, and keeping him a broken human being.
Visiting Hours is clearly influenced by the slasher genre, though. The number of victims and the variety in murder methods makes this quite obvious. If you want, you can even read the final surviving character and the end sequence as a variation on the final girl trope that changes certain things about the basic nature of the final girl; virginity and such are not a thing of relevance when you don’t populate your movie with teenagers.
Indeed, the film does give the impression that the filmmakers (script by Brian Taggert, who has some pretty great and some pretty terrible work on his CV, much of it in TV) were very consciously trying to adapt certain slasher tropes to those of the kind of thriller you might have – in less violent versions than here – encountered in ABC’s TV Movie of the Week slot, films that also very often centred around competent female characters getting into exactly the kind of trouble the women here do, for no faults of their own. It works rather well, too, the fine performances by Grant, Purl and Ironside, the shape of the violence and Lord’s control over suspense set-ups fitting nicely with the slasher elements, suggesting yet another, less codified, way the slasher could have gone.
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