X-RAY was released during a time when it wasn’t uncommon for horror movies to have multiple titles. Depending on where in the country you saw it – and when – it might have been called HOSPITAL MASSACRE or WARD 13. Whatever moniker it goes by, the movie, which celebrates its 40th anniversary on April 23, 2022, is a nasty little work that very much represents what was going on in the horror genre during the early ’80s. The phenomenal success of John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN and Sean Cunningham’s FRIDAY THE 13TH launched a trend of “slasher” flicks that were ubiquitous during the era. It’s not hyperbole to say that a new one hit cinemas almost every weekend. Most of them had some kind of twist, like being set on a particular holiday or in a specific location. In this case, as the title suggests, the setting is a hospital – a wholly appropriate backdrop for a movie that takes pride in its own sickness.
The story opens with a flashback. Young Susan Jeremy receives a valentine from classmate Harold Rusk. She laughs and crumbles it up, as he peers in her living room window. Angered by this rejection, Harold breaks into the house and fatally hangs Susan’s brother from a coatrack. It’s a hall-of-fame overreaction.
Then we jump ahead 19 years. Susan, portrayed by former Playboy Playmate Barbi Benton, is a divorcee who heads to the local hospital – on Valentine’s Day, no less! – to get the results of a simple examination. Her doctor is nowhere to be found. That’s because she’s been killed, although Susan doesn’t know it yet. She finds another medical professional, Harry (Charles Lucia), and asks him to help. Maybe you’ve already figured out X-RAY’s big twist by now. Harry is, of course, a nickname for Harold, meaning that this is the now-grown suitor Susan rejected as a child. The movie acts as though the audience won’t make that connection, even though it seems highly conspicuous when he introduces himself to her as “Harry” rather than “Dr. Rusk,” or “Dr.” anything, for that matter.
Anyway, a masked killer (Harry) has replaced Susan’s test results with fraudulent ones, leading to her being detained in the hospital. Another doctor gives her a second exam, having her disrobe behind a shield that is conveniently backlit, allowing him to admire her silhouette as she disrobes. It’s an unnecessary tease on X-RAY’s part, given that it leads to a lengthy, completely gratuitous Barbi Benton nude scene, as the lascivious physician inspects her from head to toe.
Through a series of contrivances, Susan is forbidden from leaving the facility after the exam. Meanwhile, the psycho gruesomely dispatches of anyone who stands in the way of him getting revenge. One guy gets his head pushed into a sink full of acid. (Doesn’t every hospital have one of those sitting around?) A nurse is strangled with a stethoscope. Somebody else is decapitated with a surgical bonesaw. This goes on for a while. Finally, after about 80 minutes of screen time, Susan comes face-to-face with the psycho and realizes their shared past. She douses him with flammable liquid, lights him on fire, then jumps out of the way when his flaming body charges her, sending him flying off the hospital’s roof. Actually, it’s an obvious dummy flying off the roof and crashing into the ground, but you get the idea.
Aside from the suitably mean-spirited nature of the story, X-RAY is a remarkably odd movie. It’s obsessed with fake scares. In that opening flashback, young Susan grabs a giant knife and slowly lurches toward the camera. Despite appearances, she’s merely planning to cut a piece of cake. Later, adult Susan encounters a guy in an elevator who seems to be bleeding from the mouth. Turns out he’s just eating a ketchup-drenched hamburger. Another sequence shows the audience what appears to be a ton of blood dripping onto the floor of a hospital room; it’s really red paint that’s been spilled.
This is merely the start of the strangeness. All of the doctors Susan encounters are creepy. Absolutely zero of them display any sort of professionalism, empathy, or compassion. Instead, they either visibly lust after her body or attempt to prevent her from leaving the hospital. Bedside manners have never been worse. Her fellow patients are just as strange, like the pervert who hits on her after chugging from a bottle of booze he’s smuggled in. Susan shares a room with three old ladies, one of whom is obviously played by a man in a wig and lipstick. Why? Who the hell knows? Maybe an actress failed to show up to the set and a grip or electrician filled in. Or, this being 1982, perhaps the filmmakers thought audience members would see a man in women’s clothing and assume that he was the psycho.
By far, though, the most inexplicable part of X-RAY is its central conceit. Nineteen years is a very long time to hold a grudge over a childhood crush that didn’t work out. How damaged must Harry be to go through nearly two decades of life without moving on from an incident that happened when he was in elementary school? Are we to believe that, after getting all the way through med school, he never fell in love with a woman and decided to forget about Susan? Or that he never matured enough to realize her refusal to reciprocate his affections doesn’t matter? Or that he never decided that killing her brother was vengeance enough? No, he holds on to this bitterness for years, finally orchestrating a complicated scheme to lure her to the hospital on Valentine’s Day so that he can make her pay for not acquiescing to his desires.
As non-sensical as X-RAY is, the combination of those absurdities and the genuinely noxious violence makes the movie undeniably watchable. Director Boaz Davidson made an independent horror picture that is crueler and less polished than many of its counterparts. Whereas studio filmmakers of the era maintained a semblance of decorum in their slashers, Davidson went the opposite direction, rubbing viewers’ noses in the gore, the pointless nudity, and the virtual celebration of misanthropy. In that regard, X-RAY can be upsetting to watch, despite practically none of it being plausible or realistic. Even the poster underlines the queasy nature of the movie, with its illustration of a naked, terrified Susan held down on a hospital bed while a pair of hands, one of which holds a scalpel, looms directly above her abdomen.
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of X-RAY is the chance to see Barbi Benton in one of her few motion picture roles. Aside from the fame she accumulated via Playboy, she was also a regular on the TV variety series HEE HAW and an intermittent country singer. Her biggest hit, “Brass Buckles,” was a top five hit on the country music charts in 1975. She’s not bad in the film, although after its release, she only made one other theatrical movie – a German production called HOW DID A NICE GIRL LIKE YOU GET INTO THIS BUSINESS? Guest appearances on TV’s FANTASY ISLAND and THE LOVE BOAT were more common. Eventually, Benton retired from show business altogether in order to focus on her family.
If nothing else, she can lay claim to having starred in one of the most grindhouse-y of the ‘80s grindhouse slashers. X-RAY, for better or worse, is a compelling example of the trend that most defined the horror genre in that era. And viewed in today’s #MeToo climate, it does address the toxic masculinity that causes certain men to “lay claim” to women, only to become vindictive if their advances are treated as unwelcome. A traditionally good movie it is not. But a fascinating and surprisingly relevant one? Without a doubt.
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Tags: Barbi Benton, Boaz Davidson, Charles Lucia, Friday the 13th, Grindhouse, halloween, hospital, Hospital Massacre, Marc Behm, slasher, Valentine's Day, Ward 13, X-Ray
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