Visiting Hours has quite the star cast. Michael Ironside and Lee Grant have the leads, and William Shatner and Linda Purl have supporting roles. It was also made by the same producers who worked on David Cronenberg’s Scanners (which was part of the reason Ironside got the role in the first place). With such a pedigree then, it’s slightly surprising that it ended up on the DPP’s video nasties list, but as we should know by now, the strangest films ended up on that list…
Deborah Ballin is a TV reporter whose latest story champions the case of a battered wife who shot her husband in self-defense. This has gotten her a few enemies, the worst of whom is a man named Colt Hawker, who takes the time out of his busy schedule of writing racist and misogynist screeds to various newspapers to break into her house and try to murder her (while wearing all of her jewelry). She survives his attack and gets taken to hospital, however, which is where she remains for the rest of the film while Colt tries various ways of getting to her to finish the job properly.
Colt is an… interesting person. Most of the walls of his apartment are decorated with framed letters he has written to various people, but the walls of his closet are covered with pictures of women he’s tortured and killed. Colt doesn’t really like women, you see, because his father taught him they were all worthless, just before Colt’s mother got tired of being beaten by him and threw a pan of hot oil in his face. (Despite all this, throughout the film women are practically throwing themselves at him…) Colt also wears a tiny gold bell on a chain around his neck, like the world’s smallest cowbell, and that ends up being a recurring motif throughout the film as, if you’re trying to silently stalk someone, the last thing you want to wear is a cowbell. When he finds out that Deborah survived his attack he goes to the hospital disguised as a florist to finish her off, taking the time to kill a few extra women who cross his path, taking pictures of them as they die.
Michael Ironside is by far the best thing about Visiting Hours. As Colt Hawker he barely speaks, and when he does it’s usually in a voice barely above a whisper, but he projects waves of intensity across the screen so much he doesn’t really need words. Even by the end of the film, when he smashes a beer bottle into his arm as part of his final plan, there is still control in his psychosis. He is a thoroughly unpleasant character, and yet you still find yourself almost captivated by him, wanking to know what depths he’s going to stoop to next. From the flashbacks we see of young Colt with his father, there’s also a slightly disturbing hint of sexual abuse to Colt from his father, which could be seen as confirmed by a rape victim’s comment about him: “[He beat me because] he couldn’t get it up.” The movie does go on, however: it clocks in at about 105 minutes, and I’d say at least 20 minutes of that could have been safely cut without losing very much of the plot and tension.
The other notable thing about Visiting Hours is that it’s a feminist film. I know I’ve looked at films before that have been accused of misogyny, with varying degrees of accuracy, and while Colt is undoubtedly a misogynist, the majority of the film is about women’s power. Most of the men in the film are singularly useless, letting Colt run about the place and rarely if at all listening to Deborah, Sheila (the nurse) or Lisa (the girl Colt rapes) so that they have to take matters into their own hands to deal with him (and succeed). While part of that - the would-be protectors proving to be useless - is a common staple of the slasher genre, the strength of the women in fighting back is not.
So why did Visiting Hours end up on the Video Nasties list? Well, that’s something of a mystery. The scenes that might have been the most problematic had already been cut by the BBFC before its release in the first place, and while some of the violence might be sudden, there was nothing that could be seen to have particularly drawn the BBFC’s ire (which was probably why it was only on the list for two months). Even after it came off the list though it still managed to cause controversy, as in 1989 when it was accidentally shown in its full uncut version on terrestrial TV and earned the channel a fine.
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