Hospital Massacre, also known under no less than three other titles (X-Ray, Ward 13, and Be My Valentine or Else!) is one cheesy, peculiar, campy little slasher film from the height of the splatter craze. Made in 1982 and helmed by Boaz Davidson, the director of the same year's enjoyable teen sex comedy The Last American Virgin, this incredibly hard to come by guilty pleasure gleefully features every single cliche in the slasher textbook and doesn't pretend for a second to be art -- it would fail miserably if it did.Hospital Massacreis unquestionably unintentionally (sometimes intentionally, but rarely) hilarious, full of gory madcap energy and outrageous red herrings and totally lacking any type of logic or character development on one hand, but on the other: It's just so much fun! Lots and lots of blood for gorehounds, very entertaining, with some decent suspense and good, gruesome shocks tossed into the cheese casserole.
Plus, you've got ample-bossomed Hee-Haw vet and Playboy star Barbi Benton in the lead as Susan, and she does indeed disrobe in one brief but still semi-gratuitious scene depicting a physical exam. Her acting's not bad to boot -- not award-worthy by any stretch of the imagination, but better than most of the acting in this film, which is mostly quite poor and ridiculously overdone -- but hysterically funny to poke fun at with friends and/or beers.
The overbaked plot begins on Valentine's Day of 1961 when young Susan's 10-year-old boyfriend is murdered and stuck on a coat rack by a jealous young admirer named Harold who is enraged after she laughs at and crumbles his Valentine's card. Flash forward 21 years later and we find that Susan is now some type of businesswoman who's been promoted and needs to obtain the results of a recent physical checkup for job clearance. She is brought to the hospital by her boyfriend Jack (Jon Van Ness from Tourist Trap), who falls asleep in the parking lot waiting for her to return for literally hours. It appears that a demented, heavy-breathing and quite plainly disturbed member of the staff in a surgical mask has switched Susan's medical records with that of a terminally ill patient, and the dumbass staff involuntary commits her to a really freakishly populated ward for tests, convinced she is terminal (eyes promptly roll back in head...)
Meanwhile, the psychotic staff member creates havoc throughout the hospital by slashing his way through the low-IQ staff and even lower-IQ patients with an astonishing array of weapons -- power saws, the obligatory 50-inch butcher knife, scalpels, hypodermics, acid, and various other surgical tools, even taking time to decapitate Susan's boyfriend after he finally wonders into the hospital looking for her, stuff his head in a Valentine's cake box and leave it for a hysterical Susan to find sitting on the table next to her hospital bed.
To call Hospital Massacre a mystery is a bit of an insult to the genre in general, since the identity of the killer is obvious the instant he appears on-screen without the surgical mask to anyone who's seen more than three typical slasher films in their life. Along with 1981's My Bloody Valentine, it was for a long while the only Valentine's Day slasher until Valentine in 2001 and the 2009 3-D My Bloody Valentine remake. I rate the super-bloody Hospital Massacre a 7 of 10 for its irresistible charm, nonstop action and entertainment value, and the occasional effective shock.
