Early entry into the 80s slasher film craze is surprisingly decent and is one of the few times Golan-Globus Productions ("Invasion U.S.A," "Breakin'," "Revenge of the Ninja," etc.) made a slasher picture. The opening prologue has an unpopular boy named Harold leaving a Valentine's Day card on the doorstep for pretty girl Susan. Susan and her friend find the card, laugh about it, and crumple up the Valentine. Unbeknownst to them, Harold has been watching the whole time. While Susan is getting some cake from the kitchen, she returns to her friend murdered while the creepy Harold stares at her through the window before running off. That's all the set-up you need for this slasher film, which the adult Susan, played by former playmate Barbi Benton, visits the hospital one day for some test results where she is stalked by an adult Harold who is still in love with her. From there, the bodycount continues to grow and just about every male in the hospital might be Harold (it seems like this hospital almost exclusively hired by creepy dudes). Directed and co-written by schlockmeister Boaz Davidson, who's made charming garbage since the 70s like "The Last American Virgin" all the way until today with lame films like "Mega Snake" and "Leatherface" (though he's also produced some classier films like "The Expendables," Rambo 4," and the underrated "Drive Angry"). The plot, characters, and story are pretty non-existent, but Davidson does deliver a good number of suspenseful and creepy hospital themed horrors, particularly an uncomfortable exam of Benton by a creepy doctor that seems to last forever. The film's bloody finale is also quite memorable. There are some slow parts in the second act of the film that drag, but it's not a bad film if you're in the mood for a throwback style slasher that you may have missed. FUN FACT! The film was photographed by Nicholas Josef von Sternberg, son of famed director Josef von Sternberg ("The Blue Angel" "Morocco" "Shanghai Express").

When the Valentine's Day card he sends to pretty Susan Jeremy is greeted with laughter and derision, young Harold loses the plot and impales Susan's playmate on a hat-stand. Nineteen years later, a now fully grown Susan (played by Playboy playmate Barbi Benton) attends a hospital appointment only to find a still-rather-obsessed Harold waiting there to try and steal her heart once again—only this time, he intends to do it literally with a variety of nasty surgical implements!!

Chock full of ridiculous red-herrings and annoying false scares, and displaying zero originality from start to finish, Boaz Davidson's Hospital Massacre is a derivative piece of slasher garbage that, at times, is so daft that it unintentionally borders on parody.

In the prologue, Susan is seen brandishing a large knife, only to reveal that she is about to cut a cake; later, what looks like blood drips onto Susan's shoe but which turns out to be ketchup; an unscheduled lift stop on a deserted floor results in Susan being startled by men in masks, who are then revealed to be fumigating the level; and a human shape under a sheet turns out to be a mannequin: Hospital Massacre is absolutely littered with such dumb contrivances that really grate on the nerves.

Also serving to irritate are Susan's inability to keep quiet when being stalked by the killer (she drops her lighter, knocks over reports, and clatters metal instruments at the most inopportune moments), the complete absence of any other people when the murderer strikes, the ridiculous manner in which the hospital staff treat their patients (can anyone say 'lawsuit'?), and the score, which mimics not only Harry Manfredini's music from Friday the 13th (which is understandable, I suppose), but also Jerry Goldsmith's choral chanting from The Omen (???!?!).

On the plus side, there's the occasional spot of reasonable gore (including a severed head in a box, an axe in the head and a pointed thingy through the neck), an enjoyably exploitative moment where Miss Benton strips to her panties for an unnecessary all-over examination by a pervy doctor, and one incredible, must-be-seen-to-be-believed scene in which Susan runs into a room full of people covered from head-to-toe in plaster who all proceed to flail their limbs in an uncontrollable manner. Weird.

Susan Jeremy (a pretty clunky, yet still appealingly sincere performance by gorgeous brunette knockout Barbi Benton) goes to the hospital for a routine check-up. However, poor Susan finds herself being stalked in said hospital by a mysterious psycho. Directed with astonishing all-thumbs maladroitness by Boaz Davidson, with loads of laughably obvious red herring probable suspects (skeevy drunk, weird janitor, sinister physicians, and so on), a ludicrous script by Marc Behm, clumsy attempts at suspense, an absurd heavy-breathing maniac, uproariously over the top murder set pieces, an overblown hum'n'shiver synthesizer score by Arlon Ober that comes complete with a campy shrieking chorus screaming up a storm during the more intense ooga-booga moments, and a colorful assortment of oddball patients (the trio of hideous old hags in Susan's hospital room are positively hysterical!), this hopelessly ham-fisted clunker plays like an unintentionally hilarious send-up of the slice'n'dice horror sub-genre. Making Susan a bitchy and snippy divorcée certainly doesn't help matters any. Fortunately, Barbi does indeed bare her exquisitely enormous breasts in a wonderfully leering, gratuitous, and protracted physical examination sequence. Only Nicholas Von Sternberg's glossy cinematography manages to transcend the general gut-busting ineptitude. An absolute schlocky hoot.