Somewhere in the fluorescent corridors of Visiting Hours, there might have been a good movie. A thriller about misogyny, trauma, and the terror of feeling unsafe even in a hospital should practically write itself. Instead, what we get is a Canadian slasher film that feels like it was lobotomized before filming. The only thing more lifeless than the script is the pacing—two hours that feel like a week in intensive care.
The premise sounds promising: Lee Grant plays Deborah Ballin, a feminist journalist who makes the mistake of voicing an opinion on television. Michael Ironside, whose resume should probably list “specialist in playing disturbed weirdos,” plays Colt Hawker, the kind of villain who makes Norman Bates look like a Rotary Club president. He sees Grant on TV, decides she’s the devil, and sets out to kill her. She survives his first attack, lands in the hospital, and he follows her there. What ensues is a cinematic game of hide-and-seek that drags on like a medical billing dispute.
The Killer with a Freudian Excuse
Ironside is genuinely unsettling, which is both the film’s biggest strength and its biggest problem. When your villain is the only character with any energy, you start to root for him just so something—anything—happens. Colt’s backstory is straight out of Psych 101. His abusive dad got a frying pan of hot oil to the face from mom, and now Colt hates strong women. It’s not exactly Citizen Kane. He’s basically the Joker without charisma, Norman Bates without subtlety, and Travis Bickle without a taxi.
The script gives Colt scenes of torturing women that play less like horror and more like exploitation, which is another way of saying the filmmakers confused “commentary on misogyny” with “let’s film a lot of misogyny.” Watching Colt terrorize women doesn’t feel like the film is confronting an issue; it feels like the film is indulging in it. If the message of your movie is “misogyny is bad,” it helps if your audience doesn’t feel complicit in the abuse just by sitting in their seat.
Lee Grant Deserved Better
Lee Grant, an Oscar-winning actress, must have wondered what sins she committed to wind up here. She plays Deborah as a committed, principled woman, but the script reduces her to little more than “screaming target.” She’s stalked, stabbed at, and forced to wander hospital hallways in her nightgown while doctors and security guards prove useless. The film wants her to be a symbol of female resilience, but it only gives her clichés to work with.
This is an actress who once stole scenes from Kirk Douglas and Walter Matthau. Here she’s stuck trading lines with William Shatner, who somehow manages to underact and overact simultaneously. It’s as if Captain Kirk wandered into the wrong set and nobody had the courage to tell him. Shatner plays Deborah’s boss, and his main function is to look vaguely concerned before wandering out of the story.
The Hospital of Infinite Incompetence
The biggest unintentional joke in Visiting Hours is its setting: a hospital where staff members keep wandering off to be murdered and no one notices. People vanish, bodies pile up, and yet security is so lax Colt might as well have his own office and ID badge. At one point, he disguises himself as a patient just by putting on a sling and grimacing. You begin to wonder if County General Hospital is also a comedy troupe, because it’s the only explanation for this level of negligence.
The film stretches disbelief to the point of malpractice. If this hospital existed in real life, Yelp reviews would include phrases like “great parking, poor survival rate.”
Exploitation Without Payoff
Let’s talk about tone. Visiting Hours wants to be a serious psychological thriller about misogyny, but it also wants to cash in on the slasher craze of the early ’80s. The result is a muddled stew: too grim to be fun, too cheap to be thoughtful. It doesn’t have the lurid camp of Friday the 13th or the intelligence of Halloween. It just lingers in a no-man’s land where the only real emotion it evokes is frustration.
There are attempts at social commentary—feminism vs. toxic masculinity—but they’re handled with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Deborah delivers speeches about women’s rights that sound like they were pulled from a pamphlet, while Colt’s misogyny is telegraphed in capital letters. Imagine if someone tried to film a debate and instead staged a knife fight.
Michael Ironside Carries the Film—To the Morgue
To be fair, Ironside does everything humanly possible with this material. He plays Colt with a dead-eyed intensity that makes you believe he could strangle you with a stethoscope at any moment. His performance is the only thing keeping the movie from being unwatchable. But he’s so good at being terrifying that it unbalances the film. There’s no relief, no counterweight. Watching Visiting Hours feels like sitting in on someone else’s trauma therapy session—too real to be fun, too fake to be meaningful.
The Shatner Problem
And then there’s William Shatner. He’s on the poster, his name is above the title, and yet he’s barely in the movie. His role is so inconsequential you could remove him entirely and nothing would change. He plays Deborah’s boss, Gary Baylor, but his main contribution is to remind us that sometimes typecasting isn’t such a bad thing. After this, you understand why he stuck to sci-fi conventions and Priceline commercials.
A Death by a Thousand Cuts
Clocking in at nearly two hours, Visiting Hours overstays its welcome by at least 40 minutes. Slashers are supposed to be lean, mean, and relentless. This film is slow, bloated, and padded with scenes of people wandering hallways, making phone calls, and arguing with each other about whether danger exists. It’s less a horror film and more an endurance test.
By the time Lee Grant finally stabs Colt to death in the basement, you’re not relieved for her—you’re relieved for yourself. The true horror is realizing you sat through the whole thing.
Final Diagnosis
Visiting Hours grossed $13.3 million at the box office, which is proof that horror audiences in 1982 were desperate for anything involving knives and screaming. But money doesn’t buy quality. This is a film that mistakes sadism for suspense, confusion for complexity, and hospitals for horror.
The tagline should have been: “Visiting Hours: Where Your Patience Runs Out Before the Patients Do.”
Grade: D
Not scary, not smart, and not worth the admission. Watching it feels less like being entertained and more like being stuck in a waiting room with Shatner reading lines at you. The only thing this film successfully murders is your time.
