THE HOSPITAL

CONTAINS SPOILERS

This is the film Tesco doesn't want you to see - and that's its one and only claim to fame. Just as the legendary video nasty list of the early 1980s gave terrible films like Unhinged, Bloody Moon and Nightmares In A Damaged Brain a notoriety they didn't merit, so this genuinely atrocious piece of amateur home movie garbage will ultimately go down in history as a very minor footnote in the history of interfering know-nothing busybodies trying to get sleazy horror films banned, rather than disappearing into the murk where it rightfully belongs. There's nothing in The Hospital that's remarkable, innovative or interesting: rather, it's crass, tedious, embarrassing in its desperate attempts to shock and offend, and just plain unprofessional in its technical execution.

The film boasts three plotlines: the ghosts alleged to haunt the abandoned St Leopold's Hospital, the obese mentally handicapped rapist/murderer who works as a groundskeeper, and the arrival of a busload of morons supposedly making a pilot for a reality show about the paranormal. Except they're actually making snuff porn movies, raping and murdering their "stars" on camera for the lucrative Ukrainian pervert market. Will any of the girls survive, and will you, the viewer, care?

No. You won't care because the two directors are incapable of making you give a damn whether anyone lives or dies. They can't write, they can't direct, and they can't get performances out of the cast - the acting is honestly no better than a "stand here and say this" readthrough of the unspeakable first draft script. More horror lies in the notion of one of the writer-directors acting as his own casting director for the vile rape scenes he appears in (playing the mentally handicapped rapist/murderer groundskeeper), than any of the casual misogynistic abuse and badly staged violence and torture. It's stupid, cheap, nasty-minded trash made by cynical hacks gleefully piling on the sadism, but without the faintest whiff of talent to make it any good at all.

By rights The Hospital would already be a forgotten bargain bin obscurity, along with the legions of found-footage bores and Asylum knockoffs, and it's only because one man managed to get Tesco to remove it from their shelves that it's got any notice at all. Even the fetid gunk at the bottom of Jess Franco and Joe D'Amato's barrels were never as unremittingly foul as this, one of the very, very worst I've seen in over thirty years (and that includes The Summer Of The Massacre). Hopefully the clods who slung this rubbish together never, ever, get within two hundred yards of a camera again.

*