Visiting Hours Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

Visiting Hours Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson August 18, 2021

Visiting Hours (1982) is being released as part of Scream Factory's one-disc Double Feature, which also includes Bad Dreams (1988) on the other layer of this BD-50.

In his seventh feature, director Jean-Claude Lord constructs the narrative of Visiting Hours as a whydunit rather than a whodunit, although he takes his time in the first reel to gradually peel off the serial killer's identity. Television journalist Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant) is being interviewed at her station about a woman on trial for killing her husband. Deborah opines that it was self-defense instead of in cold blood. This is part of a broader editorial that she is advancing about the prominence of too much violence against women. An individual squeezing a black rubber ball behind his back watches the interview on a monitor. When it concludes, he yanks the coaxial cable out in an act of apparent disgust. Deborah comes home later in the evening and calls for her maid are met with silence throughout the house. The shower water is running and suddenly, Deborah is attacked by an overly large man "disguised" with jewelry and earrings around his nose and mouth. She is injured by her assailant's nearly eight-inch blade and taken to County General Hospital for tests and care.

Lord doesn't waste time revealing Deborah's perpetrator. He's Colt Hawker (Michael Ironside), a sanitation worker at the TV station Deborah works who lives in a rather drab apartment complex. Screenwriter Brian Taggert does a fine job of showing Colt's difficult childhood and the origins of his sexual repression. Mr. Hawker (Dustin Waln) often used to play with young Colt (Danny Silverman). But the tickling while his son laid in a supine position later contributed to his repressed feelings. Colt's father was physically abusive to his mother, Elizabeth (Maureen McRae), which compelled her to throw boiling fat at his face, resulting in permanent facial scars. Colts visits his father on occasion at a care facility. There's a very good scene where Colt is sitting against the wall in a basement recalling his turbulent boyhood years. Lord visually shows the adult Colt's infantilization. He cries and nestles himself in a fetal position.

Let's play keep-away.

Visiting Hours is frequently set in an understaffed, frequently dark hospital where Colt puts on various disguises to gain entry and stalk Deborah. This setup and premise is quite similar to the Rosenthal-directed and Carpenter-produced Halloween II in which Michael prowls through Haddonfield Memorial Hospital to search for Laurie. (That sequel came out only a year earlier.) Sheila Munroe (Linda Purl), the pretty nurse looking after Deborah, even looks a bit like Jill (Tawny Moyer), the blonde nurse from Halloween II. Cinematographer René Verzier's widescreen compositions and placement of figures in the frame are also similar to Dean Cundey's, although HII is the better shot picture of the two. Four original critical reviews of Visiting Hours I found made at at least a passing reference to HII. I'm surprised that more did not the comparison.

Visiting Hours received many condemnatory reviews accusing it of misogyny and an unapologetic exploitation of female characters. However, there were less than a handful which appreciated what it tried to do. The Kansas City Star's Robert C. Trussell praised certain aspects: "The film’s principal strengths are crisp, suspense-building edit­ing and camera work, and Mr. Ironside’s genuinely frightening performance as the killer. To his credit, he is the only member of the cast who achieves much cred­ibility....the film succeeds in shocking and jolting the audience." Ed Blank of The Pittsburgh Press recounted a raucous audience at the showing that he attended: "At the first performance at the Fiesta, a cheerful fellow felt compelled to holler, 'Kill ’em all!' to the psychopath on screen. A mo­ment later, the same stable patron added, 'That’s one slick dude, man!' Two rows up, a baby bumpkin of about 25 bounced repeatedly in his seat and rubbed his hands together whenever the killer went on the prowl....[H]e stood up and announced to no one in particular that he was staying to see it again. Then he sat down and pealed the wrapper off a thick sausage." The Orlando Sentinel's Sumner Rand knew the film's target demographic and gave it credit for being superior to others of its ilk: "Fans of blood and gore, sadism and shock certainly get their mon­ey’s worth in this Canadian-made horror movie....It is, perhaps, a better-made and more expensive picture than the cheapies turned out to exploit the popularity of chillers that be­gan a few years ago with Halloween." While The Baltimore Sun's Stephen Hunter gave it a mixed review, he's perhaps the only critic at the time to understand that it indeed attempted some different things: "It might be termed a revisionist mad-slasher pic­ture and critics who call it just another horror picture really aren’t watching it closely. What gives it its surprising edge, its unusual depth, its resonance, goes far beyond its shrewd obedience to the conventions of its genre: it’s something more than what it seems, and I wonder if the viewers drawn in by the lurid ads will quite catch on. Visiting Hours is a feminist meditation on male depravity and violence, and on female bonding...the film is definitely made from the woman’s point of view, and it must be seen as the first anti-backlash picture, a response to the recent surge in women-hating movies that fed on male rage and hostility—and fear."

Visiting Hours Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Scream Factory's release of Visiting Hours comes on one layer of the disc's BD-50, which employs the MPEG-4 AVC encode. The film appears in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1. The opening scene sports fuzzy grain that's accented with a light red through the bright lights shown on Deborah for her interview. The print only has minor speckles that are small in number. The varnish on Deborah's balustrade shined even with minimal lighting. Skin tones are occasionally pinkish, especially on the cheeks (see Screenshot #s 6, 10, 11, and 13). Lawrence Toppman of The Charlotte News has noted the movie's washed-out cine­matography (see the shallow focus shot in #1) and this looks is most prevalent in Colt's apartment with its off-white walls. Scream has encoded the feature at a mean video bitrate of 20000 kbps.

Scream has provided twelve chapter marks for the 105-minute film.

Visiting Hours Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Scream supplies a DTS-HD Master Audio Dual Mono mix (2067 kbps, 24-bit). Spoken words are discernible and crisply delivered. The monaural track may be flat but isn't at all faint sounding. In fact, it primarily produces high-end sounds even within its limited range. The aforesaid Ed Blank heard "loud, sudden noises" when watching it in a theater and those are also reproduced here at a relatively normal listening volume. Canadian composer Jonathan Goldsmith's (no relation to Jerry) music over the opening credits sounds like Manfredini's score for Friday the 13th (1980). Other parts of Goldsmith's score are reminiscent of Carpenter's classic Halloween (1978). It would be no surprise if both of those scores were used as temp tracks while Goldsmith wrote his own. I particularly like the way he way he waits in between piano bars before playing the next notes, thus heightening the suspense.

I also watched Visiting Hours with just the optional English SDH turned on and they deliver a complete, accurate transcription of the dialogue.

Visiting Hours Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• NEW Brian Taggart: The B-movie Kid (43:47, 1080p) - Taggart discusses some of the themes of his plays and the authors who influenced him. He explains how he met Pierre David, Michael Ironside, Linda Purl, and Lee Grant. Taggart also spends time talking about writing and working on the movies and tele-films Of Unknown Origin, The Spell, The New Kids, Omen IV: The Awakening, and Poltergeist III. In English, not subtitled.

• NEW Une Visite Avec Executive Producer Pierre David (11:18, 1080p) - David talks about starting in distribution in Canada and French-Canadian movie productions. He also speaks about his collaboration with Jean-Claude Lord (e.g., on Les colombes) and wanting to film Visiting Hours in a hospital. David makes the case that he's the Visiting Hours ("a producer's movie") and that he had final cut over the studio. Additionally, David explains his dealings with Jeffrey Katzenberg and studio exec Norman Levy. Further, David briefly addresses shopping the film around to studios and testing it in different markets. In English, not subtitled.

• NEW Visiting with Actress Lenore Zann (22:59, 1080p) - Zann tries to recollect the audition process for Visiting Hours and connects her character of Lisa in the film to Maggie, who she portrayed in Happy Birthday to Me (1981). She brings up her work in 1980's Hounds of Notre Dame (which was her big-screen debut) as well as voice work she's done in animation and anime. Zann gives some details about what she's been up to outside of acting, which includes writing a play about Marilyn Monroe and her active participation in Nova Scotia politics. In English, not subtitled.

• Photo Gallery (0:55) - One of Shout's shortest image galleries (ten in all). The first seven are color photographs taken during production. The last three comprise images (including one design concept) of the movie's poster.

• Original Radio Spot (0:32) - this radio spot for Visiting Hours purports to excerpting audio from a preview audience's reaction while watching the film.

• Original TV Spots (2:09, upconverted to 1080p) - four TV spots for Visiting Hours presented in 1.33:1. Image quality is very good. These are more like teaser trailers with only two really showing footage from the film. These first appeared on the 2006 Anchor Bay DVD (as did the radio spot).

• Bonus Trailers - bonus previews for The Dungeonmaster, Dark Angel, Futureworld, and The Incredible Melting Man. These can be selected from the Bonus' sub-menu. Fortunately, none play before any of the two menus launch.

Visiting Hours Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

With Visiting Hours, Brian Taggert tried to exhaust all the genre tropes of the psychopathic horror thriller while also adding in some new wrinkles. One weakness of his script, though, is that the Lee Grant protagonist is placed into many victimized roles where she's seen as weak, feeble, and prone to semi-hysterical outbursts. She definitely doesn't act that way all throughout but ever since she's attacked at home, she isn't given much agency. I also was disappointed with some of the decisions Taggert made for nurse Sheila and her plight. Further, I wished Taggert had developed the would-be subplot between Sheila and her daughter's babysitter. Still, Visiting Hours reminds me a lot of Halloween II without ripping it off too much and coupled with Michael Ironside's explosive performance, that's enough for me to RECOMMEND it! Scream Factory's video and audio presentations are very solid. It's terrific to have a long interview with Taggert. The shorter visits with Pierre David and Lenore Zann are also very good. If you want different interviews with Taggert, David—as well as with Jean Claude Lord and Linda Purl—then you'll need to get the Final Cut Entertainment BD/DVD from the UK. Overall, I give Scream's extras the edge.