Horror Hospital DVD Review
In Horror Hospital, an over-worked musician, Jason, goes on vacation after seeing an ad for “Hairy Holidays”, a travel agency that caters to the young, hip and hairy demographic. On his train ride to his Hairy Holiday, he meets Judy who is on her way to see her estranged Aunt Harris for the first time ever. Upon arrival at their destination station, the station attendent sends them off to a house and secretly phones ahead. They are picked up by two leather-clad bikers wearing white helmets. They arrive at the house to find that it is not as hospitible as they may have thought. After only one night, they witness a room with massively bloody sheets, a dinner table full of guests that don’t speak or respond to there speaking and the decapitation of a their travel agent. With their suspicions aroused they try to escape only to be wrangled in by the two leather clad motorcyclists and the head of the house Dr. Storm. After which they are clued into the gruesome experiments that he has been working on, using humans as guinea pigs for his mind control tests. Will they escape before being turned into mindless zombies by Dr. Storm?
I found Horror Hospital to be pretty boring. It barely makes it as a zombie flick given that the guinea pig patients (i.e. the zombies) don’t do much beyond doing exactly what they are told to do to demonstrate their submissiveness. You’re lead to believe that the leather clad bikers are actually zombies, but it seems that they didn’t have enough money to buy more than two of the outfits. So, whenever one are dispatched the next scene is sure to have two fresh ones that look just like the other two – one taller, one shorter.
Michael Gough makes for a very creepy Dr. Storm. I never knew very much of this actor beyond his roles as Alfred Pennyworth in the Tim Burton Batman series. After watching this I checked out his filmography to see if he had been type-cast as a horror actor or not. He did have his fair share of roles in horror movies, but not overly so.
The special effects and gore were pretty lite for a movie called Horror Hospital. Throughout the movie you see that there is this gruesome monster that lurks in the dark and casts a horrifying shadow. You never really see this creature very well, maybe at the end but I was pretty uninterested by that point to keep it all in check. Most of the gore is implied rather than shown. They drive a car that decapitates pedestrians, but it never shows it happening. You just see a head quickly fall into a catcher bag below it.
IMDb writers have offered that this movie may have inspired the Rocky Horror Picture Show a whole lot, but that’s yet another movie I never got into very much. Rocky Horror fans may find this movie interesting for that aspect, but I don’t believe I could sell this to anyone else, least of all to zombie genre enthusiasts.
