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.

Wow! Where to begin?

Hospital Massacre seems like one of those movies that an alien from a different planet would make about humans. So many characters behave in such ridiculously bizarre ways that no one seems like a real person. It's probably best to turn off your mind before going into this one and just rolling with it.

The story itself might make zero sense, but it seems as if it's just a coat hanger to hang a series of gory, imaginative death scenes on and those scenes are certainly memorable. It's never terribly gory (in fact, it tends to cut away before it shows too much most of the time),but the scenes themselves are unlike anything you've ever seen. Watch a nurse turn a corner and come face to face with the killer at the end of the hall who's walking towards her with a sheet stretched out in front of him. Like most of the film, it's hard to tell if this is dreamlike and creepy or incredibly hilarious.

Much like the same year's Halloween II, there are only a handful of patients in this entire hospital and the people in charge must be trying to save money on electricity, because there are so many dark corners and hallways everywhere.

Barbi Benton isn't half bad in her meager role which just consists of her looking scared, angry, or hysterical. At least when she isn't being subjected to hysterically gratuitous nude examination scenes.

I'm not sure what Hospital Massacre was intending to be, but it sure turned out fun.