1980 film Schizoid and 1982 film X-Ray have one important thing in common…they’re both on the same Blu-ray. What better reason to blog about them together?
We all go a little Schizoid sometimes
In Schizoid, the women from the same group therapy start getting killed with a pair of scissors…and always after they sleep with therapist Klaus Kinski. Why is it that such a creepy man always gets all the women in movies? The dude even seems to be hot for his own daughter in this one, played by the amazing Jaws 2 scream queen and Angel prostitute Donna Wilkes.
The film actually has a pretty cool cast. Also present is Craig Wasson of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Joe Regalbuto from Murphy Brown, and even fricking Christopher Lloyd as a creepy maintenance man.
The first kill shows great promise. A chick on a bicycle is bumped off the road by a car…and immediately runs to the nearest abandoned house. It’s an awesome chase scene, there’s a jump scare you can see coming from a mile away yet I still jumped, and then she is brutally stabbed with the scissor. Soon after, a couple sneaks into a barn to have sex…and the body comes falling out on them. Sounds like a classic slasher.
Yeah. There are some cool kills and chase scenes. But seriously, this movie is schizoid. Talk about a whodunit. EVERYONE is mental! I didn’t even care who the murderer was. I wanted them all locked away!
Beware Michael Myers, the doctor is in!
Instead of being released under its awesome title Hospital Massacre, this slasher is presented under the alternate title X-Ray. I had to check this one out because it features the kids from Bloody Birthday, which I recently blogged about. In fact, when the film began, I thought it was a sequel to Bloody Birthday. There was a cake, the little girl with bitchy resting face, and Billy Jayne (once known as Billy Jacoby) from Just One of the Guys. The third kid, a blond boy, might as well have been the blond boy from Bloody Birthday because they both did like one movie and are completely forgettable.
So it has something to do with it being Valentine’s Day, Billy Jayne giving the little girl a Valentine, she and her brother mocking him—and then a pretty gruesome death of a kid. Awesome.
Flash forward, and the little blonde girl with bitchy resting face has grown into brunette beauty Barbi Benton!!! Ah. The magic of the movies. During some routine testing at a hospital on Valentine’s Day, Barbi is immediately suspicious that she’s in a horror movie. She sees a dead bleeding dude on the elevator—but he’s just a guy who was eating a burger with ketchup and fell asleep. She runs into three guys in gas masks and is terrified (I’m convinced this is a nod to My Bloody Valentine from a year before). Then the elevator stops and the lights go out. Okay, maybe she is in a horror movie.
Forget Halloween II when you have someone in surgical attire going around brutally murdering everyone in sight. Hospital Massacre has gruesome kills and a dramatic choral score right out of The Omen. It has nurses who walk around in a daze and look just like fembots whenever they stare coldly at Barbi. It has a killer who is constantly doing clerical paperwork around the hospital to make sure Barbi can’t leave. It has Barbi getting a very sensual examination while in nothing but her bikini underwear. And it has a hospital chase scene that pretty much never ends.
And when the nightmare is over, Barbi walks out of the hospital all bright and smiling to meet her daughter—almost as if she’d just gone in for a routine test.
BTW: Barbi Benton and Tanya Roberts really need to play sisters in a movie.
